Ann Coulter

Last night, Politico broke the news that during Herman Cain’s tenure as director of the National Restaurant Association in the late 1990s, two women left the trade association after settling sexual harassment claims against Cain. Cain has since denied the charges, accusing the media of leading a “witch hunt” against him and responding to one reporter by asking, “Have you ever been accused of sexual harassment?”

Like clockwork, the Right’s major media critics are rallying to Cain’s defense.

Brent Bozell of the Media Research Council even tied the allegations against Cain to the discredited accusations that Bill Clinton raped Juanita Broaddrick when he was attorney general of Arkansas. Bozell argues that while the Cain story is a “hit piece,” the media should have given more coverage to the Broaddrick allegations:

Sadly, Herman Cain’s predictions have come true. In May he stated that he was ‘ready for the same high-tech lynching that [Clarence Thomas] went through -- for the good of this country.’ That's what Politico is doing with its unsubstantiated and thoroughly hypocritical hit piece against him. Anyone in the press that gives this story oxygen is equally hypocritical.

In the eyes of the liberal media, Herman Cain is just another uppity black American who has had the audacity to leave the liberal plantation. So they must destroy him, just as they tried destroying Clarence Thomas. The richest irony here is that the same media that refused to cover evidence of an alleged rape by a state Attorney General who became President now are running stories based on unnamed sources, about offenses that aren’t a fraction as grave. But one was a liberal Democrat, the other a conservative Republican -- hence the double standard.

Rush Limbaugh is also using the Cain case to attack Clinton. Limbaugh said that coverage of the charges, which were originally made in the 1990s, amount to a racist media trying to bring down a black conservative:

You know, I guess I shouldn't be surprised, folks. After all of these years, none of us should be surprised, but I still am. Look at how quickly what is known as the mainstream media goes for the ugliest racial stereotypes they can to attack a black conservative. You know who's laughing himself silly today is Bill Clinton. (imitating Clinton) "Yeah, I really did it. Ha-ha. They praised me and they went as far out of their way as they could. Even my old buddy Carville is out there and he's saying, 'Look what happens when you drag a dollar bill through a trailer park, you get Paula Jones.' I have everybody defending me and they're going after this black guy, and they're going after him with some of the ugliest racial stereotypes I have ever seen. That's how our side does it; we get away with it. I just love it. I love watching it."

What's next, folks? A cartoon on MSNBC showing Herman Cain with huge lips eating a watermelon? What are they gonna do next? No, Snerdley, I'm not kidding. The racial stereotypes that these people are using to go after Herman Cain, what is the one thing that it tells us? It tells us who the real racists are, yeah, but it tells us that Herman Cain is somebody. Something's going on out there. Herman Cain obviously is making some people nervous for this kind of thing to happen.

Not to be outdone, Ann Coulter said on Fox News that the left is twisting civil rights laws that were meant “to protect blacks from Democrats from the South” to help “white women from Scarsdale”:

“It’s outrageous the way liberals treat a black conservative,” she told Geraldo. “This is another high-tech lynching.

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Nothing liberals fear more than a black conservative. Ask Allen West. Ask Michael Steele. Ask Clarence Thomas. And even what the allegations are here, I mean, just shows you how the civil-rights juggernaut has gone off the rails. The idea of civil rights laws to begin with ironically was to protect blacks from Democrats from the South who won’t protect them. Now it’s you know, white women from Scarsdale who say, ‘Oh, I don’t like that he called me honey.’” Coulter also questioned some of the details of the report and if they merited the definition of harassment.

“It’s not groping, it’s not touching or demanding sex,” Coulter said. “It’s that he had remarks that they found inappropriate. One is he had inappropriate gestures that were not overtly sexual. Well, what were they then? This isn’t dropping your pants and saying ‘kiss it.’ This is an outrageous attack on a black conservative who is doing extremely well and will be our vice-presidential candidate.”

Last week, GOProud announced that Ann Coulter would be joining the organization’s Advisory Council as Honorary Chair where her official title would be "Gay Icon."

Coulter's willingness to serve in this capacity has created utter confusion for the hosts of the American Family Association's "AFA Report" where Fred Jackson, Ed Vitagliano and Buster Wilson were left wondering just how on earth Coulter can do this and still consider herself to be a Christian:

Vitagliano: Ann Coulter is hard to read but if you're a Christian, I think you should take more care to tailor your commitments in things like this to your Christian views. I don't know whether she just hasn't thought this through or what, but this is kind of disappointing to me.

This is not an issue, I don't think, that you clown around with. This is a very serious issue. I know she likes to laugh, she likes to have fun with her politics, but this is not an issue that you clown around with. It has serious real-world repercussions.

Jackson: I think it begs the questions then Buster: how must Ann Coulter feel about the authority of Scripture? How can you join a group like this and allowed to be called the honorary chair and gay icon of the group and still feel comfortable calling yourself an evangelical Christian? There's a gap there in the reasoning.

Wilson: I don't know. It raises a huge red flag for me. The Bible has got to be the standard and it's not.

If you thought that the arguments opposing the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell weren’t desperate enough, many on the Right are now suggesting that the ban on gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military should be kept in place because the alleged Wikileaks-leaker is gay. A New York Times profile on intelligence analyst Bradley Manning’s “desperation for acceptance — or delusions of grandeur” found that much of his “social life was defined by the need to conceal his sexuality under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and he wasted brainpower fetching coffee for officers.” The Times went on to report that “even as he professed a perhaps inflated sense of purpose, he called himself ‘emotionally fractured’ and a ‘wreck’ and said he was ‘self-medicating like crazy.’”

For the right wing media, the story wasn’t that Manning had a history of being victimized and excluded because of his sexual orientation, but that as a result of his sexual orientation he became a traitor. Ann Coulter suggests that Manning was a “narcissistic hothouse flower” and the “poster boy for Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”:

With any luck, Bradley's court-martial will be gayer than a Liza Minelli wedding. It could be the first court-martial in U.S. history to feature ice sculptures and a "Wizard of Oz"-themed gazebo. "Are you going to Bradley's court-martial? I hear Patti LaBelle is going to sing!"

Maybe there's a reason gays have traditionally been kept out of the intelligence services, apart from the fact that closeted gay men are easy to blackmail. Gays have always been suspicious of that rationale and perhaps they're right.

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Bradley's friends told the Times they suspected "his desperation for acceptance -- or delusions of grandeur" may have prompted his document dump.

Let's check our "Gay Profile at a Glance" and ... let's see ... desperate for acceptance ... delusions of grandeur ... yep, they're both on the gay subset list!

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Look at the disaster one gay created under our punishing "don't ask, don't tell" policy. What else awaits America with the overturning of a policy that was probably put there for a reason (apart from being the only thing Bill Clinton ever did that I agreed with)?

Liberals don't care. Their approach is to rip out society's foundations without asking if they serve any purpose.

The Family Research Council has also jumped in, commenting:

Now that the enemy has access to American intelligence, our mission in the Middle East may be irreparably harmed--all because President Obama is less concerned with winning the war than he is with winning the far-Left's approval. Unfortunately for all of us, Manning's betrayal painfully confirms what groups like FRC have argued all along: the instability of the homosexual lifestyle is a detriment to military readiness. By foisting this agenda on our soldiers, the White House is not only jeopardizing the future of national security but compromising its present.

WorldNetDaily’s Joseph Farah said that “the system of moral blindness and the disconnect from common sense,” which allowed Manning to serve as a closeted gay man in the first place, “made [the leak] inevitable.” Cliff Kincaid of the conservative Accuracy In Media blasted news outlets for not covering Manning’s sexual orientation enough for his liking, and claims that Manning’s sexuality and support for gay rights show that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell doesn’t go far enough and should become more stringent. Kincaid writes:

Now, because of the obvious mishandling of this homosexual ticking time bomb, it appears that the United States, its soldiers, and relations with countries in the region will pay the price. Lives-and a war on terrorism in Afghanistan-could be lost.

The revelations of Manning's openly pro-homosexual conduct suggest that a more liberal Department of Defense policy, in deference to the wishes of the Commander-in-Chief, had already been in effect and has now backfired in a big way.

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The dramatic revelations about Manning's circle of friends and associates suggest that, rather than repeal the homosexual exclusion policy, as Obama is demanding, the prohibition on homosexuals should have been more strictly enforced and that it should be strengthened today.

As the Right tries to score political points by saying that due to Manning’s individual problems and turmoil, all gay and lesbian servicemembers should be viewed as disgruntled, treacherous, unstable, and disloyal people. And, the say, rather than dismantle Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, which produces extreme and troubling pressures on closeted soldiers, the policy should become more severe and oppressive.

Last week we noted that, just days before she was scheduled to headline GOProud's "Homocon 2010," Ann Coulter dedicated her most recent column to praising Ronald Reagan for fighting any "government endorsement of homosexuality." 

And, amazing, the theme that gay rights have no place in the conservative movement is a theme that Coulter continued to drill home when she delivered her remarks to GOProud:

Ann Coulter doesn't mince words. And even when speaking to a gay conservative organization, GOProud, at their inaugural Homocon party on Saturday night, she apparently wasn't willing to start.

After a series of jokes about conservative that sounded -- and were received -- more like a stand-up act then a political speech, Coulter told the assembled (and predominantly wealthy) conservative gay crowd why they should oppose same sex marriage, adding, "I should warn you: I've never failed to talk gays out of gay marriage."

And then she did.

First, she ran down the stereotypical stand-up comedian's list of reasons, including that lacking the legal right to marriage allows the less-committed partner to weasel out of it. But in a more serious note, she parroted the losing arguments of the lawyers supporting California's Prop 8 and told the crowd that the reason she opposes (and they should oppose) same sex marriage is that it is strictly for procreation.

In one of a series of racially insensitive remarks that pervaded her speech, Coulter added, "Marriage is not a civil right. You're not black." It was part of a larger argument on which she later elaborated, telling the crowd that the 14th Amendment only applies to African-Americans and that it does not, in fact, apply to women, LGBT people or other minorities.

Despite the laugh lines, Coulter's arguments against same sex marriage were not well-received by much of the crowd: for instance, the question and answer session after the speech was dominated by Homocon attendees grilling her on her position on a range of issues, including whether opposition to same sex marriage was really in line with the conservative principles of limited government and whether she personally believes that homosexuality is a choice -- a question she declined to answer.

Now, you may wonder why anyone would pay good money to attend an event where the keynote speaker would insult them to their faces, but GOProud stands by its decision because, as GOProud's Christopher Barron put it: "We’re the only gay group that had the balls to have someone like Ann Coulter come speak to them."

You know, if GOProud wants to prove just how tough they are, maybe they should invite Bryan Fischer to headline "Homocon 2011" because he really really hates gays. 

In fact, Fischer initially blasted Ann Coulter as a traitor for even agreeing to speak to GOProud, but now that she went and openly insulted all those in attendance, Fischer admits that he was completely wrong about her:

Ann took them straight on and gave them some straight talk I doubt they were ready for. There is no amount of sugar that will help this medicine go down ... This from the keynote speaker at HomoCon, who got at least five figures to get right in the grill of her hosts.

Anybody at HomoCon want their money back?

And Ann, all is forgiven. Humble pie has never tasted so sweet. You are no longer the "Joan of Arc of homosexuality," as I described you last month, you are now Daniella of the Lion's Den. Good on ya, lass.

GOProud can try to spin this debacle all it wants, but the fact that Ann Coulter has become a hero to Bryan Fischer because of the speech she delivered at Homocon 2010 pretty much tells you all you need to know.