In all seriousness: The Agema Issue

Dave Agema: Michigan's Republican Ass Clown



Readers of this blog know that I seldom attack current issues - that I lovingly leave to Bob over at I Should Be Laughing.

HOWEVER, there are some things that really rankle me up, and one of them is the matter of Dave Agema, a member of Michigan's Republican National Committee.

It seems that Agema is drawing fire for a post on his Facebook Page that quotes from a "report" written by a "Dr. Frank Joseph" entitled "Everyone Should Know These Statistics on Homosexuals".

The article claims many myths things that we used to hear back in the 1980s.  That Homosexuals spread AIDS.  That Homosexuals commit over half the murders.  The article claims that skyrocketing medical costs are directly attributable to the care od AIDS patients.  The only thing the report doesn't blame on LGBT people is the proverbial "ring around the collar". 

I could go on, but all of this is old news.

For his part, Agema says he has no regrets, and isn't going anywhere.  And the State Central Party, while not reprimanding Agema said that it supports "traditional marriage" and that is that.

Still, at a time when the GOP knows it is bleeding voters in the age groups and ethnic groups that it knows that it must speak to, something like this stings.

But what isn't old news is 70 Michigan Republicans acted swiftly and surely and called for Agema to resign his post. 

Grand Traverse County Precinct Delegate Dennis Lennox was reported by Associated Press as saying:

"You can't expect to get undecided voters to vote for you if you spit in their face, and that's exactly what he's done," Lennox said. "He has spit in the face of millions of American who would otherwise be inclined to support the party."1

So the question I asked was where in the heck did Agema get this Reagan Era Bullshit.  First its old hate propaganda.  Secondly, besides verifiable facts that dispute these claims, and a growing public opinion that LGTB Americans support marriage equality, did Agema just come across this "person" and who is the person behind the report.

I have no idea where Agema got this report but I am willing to bet that he went to a search engine and typed in "Gay People" and "AIDS" and it spat this shit out. 

But the report itself has been around for about 20 years.

The report was proffered up by an organization "Tradition in Action" (TiA), a LosAngeles based Catholic group that seems to hate just about everybody.  In addition to "Homosexuals", (TiA) also hates Jews and Masons, too.   One of the biggest things in its craw, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center is that TiA dredges up all manner of heresy and still holds grudges against Jews for leaving Spain in the 1490s instead of converting to Catholicism. 

Now that's someone who holds a grudge.

TiA was founded by a woman named Marian Horvat in 1995, and the SPLC also states that Harvat wanted to attract "counter-revolutionaries" to help save the Catholic Church from itself, so to speak, and return to its traditional teachings.

My second question then is, who is Dr. Frank Joseph, M.D., the author of this report.   And the simple answer is that I can find no "real" to validate as the author.  In other words, there is no real "Dr. Frank Joseph".  In fact, all major search engines, Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc. always return the same phrasing ("These were put together by Dr. Frank Joseph, MD...") and only return a limited number of hits leading me to believe that no such person exists.  And call me jaded, but the favored "cloak" of identity by wingnuts always seems to be the use of first names as first and last names.  My feeling is that someone wanted to give credence to their hate and created "Dr. Frank Joseph, M.D." as a straw man to bolster their irrational hate.

So what does this say about Agema's use of the report? 

It confirms to me that Agema is an idiot, quite possibly racist and a fool to promote "facts" that can and have been easily be verified as lies, in both logic and fact.

I know, I could have made that determination based on his use of these outdated wives tale.  But for those of you that know me, I like to be sure of these things. 

But It also tells me that the Michigan RNC has on its steering committee a wingnut who is too stupid to know what he is talking about, too stupid to check his sources and too stupid to be in a position where any political party would want an Ass Clown in their ranks.

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