Calling someone a faggot — isn’t that hate speech?
“He was like ‘You need to respect me.’ He was in my face. He was obviously trying to intimidate me and scare me,” Hilton said. “I was like ‘I don’t need to respect you. I don’t respect you and I did say this, and I knew that it would be the worst thing I could possibly say to him because he was acting the way he was. I said ‘You know what, I don’t respect you and you’re gay and stop being such a faggot.’”
Three videos you need to see.
Can’t say I feel much pity for pouty Perez Hilton, Monday’s victim du jour.
Some choice quotes from the whupped gossip queen:
“I am a human being and no one deserves to be treated that way. Violence is never the answer.”
“God is looking down on you and shaming you.”
It’s worse than I thought, and I’ve always had a VERY low opinion of Scientology.
• Physical violence permeated Scientology’s international management team. Miscavige set the tone, routinely attacking his lieutenants. Rinder says the leader attacked him some 50 times.
Rathbun, Rinder and De Vocht admit that they, too, attacked their colleagues, to demonstrate loyalty to Miscavige and prove their mettle.
• Staffers are disciplined and controlled by a multilayered system of “ecclesiastical justice.” It includes publicly confessing sins and crimes to a group of peers, being ordered to jump into a pool fully clothed, facing embarrassing “security checks” or, worse, being isolated as a “suppressive person.”
At the pinnacle of the hierarchy, Miscavige commands such power that managers follow his orders, however bizarre, with lemming-like obedience.
• Church staffers covered up how they botched the care of Lisa McPherson, a Scientologist who died after they held her 17 days in isolation at Clearwater’s Fort Harrison Hotel.
Rathbun, who Miscavige put in charge of dealing with the fallout from the case, admits that he ordered the destruction of incriminating evidence. He and others also reveal that Miscavige made an embarrassing miscalculation on McPherson’s Scientology counseling.
• With Miscavige calling the shots and Rathbun among those at his side, the church muscled the IRS into granting Scientology tax-exempt status. Offering fresh perspective on one of the church’s crowning moments, Rathbun details an extraordinary campaign of public pressure backed by thousands of lawsuits.
• To prop up revenues, Miscavige has turned to long-time parishioners, urging them to buy material that the church markets as must-have, improved sacred scripture.
You don’t have to understand the language to admire the defiance. Filmed in October 2007, it shows Tehran University students protesting a staged visit by Ahmadinejad.
Less than two weeks earlier Mahmoud spoke at Columbia University, where he was greeted cordially — until he spoke ill of homosexuality.
I wonder what this Daily Kos diarist, identifying as a Jewish lesbian, thinks of her cuddly dictator now.
Okay, I admit it. Part of it is that he just looks cuddly. Possibly cuddly enough to turn me straight. I think he kind of looks like Kermit the Frog. Sort of. With smaller eyes. But that’s not all …
He takes up the charge of other communities struggling for freedom and justice …
He seems to extend genuine condolences for September 11th …
I’m only saying it’s hard to know the full story when the Bush Administration seems so invested in smearing Ahmadinejad — and the media, as we’ve already learned with Iraq, is happy to choose its facts in convenient accordance. Maybe we shouldn’t buy into the Bush team’s characterization of Ahmadinejad as part of their drumbeat escalating toward potential war. Maybe we should listen to Ahmadinjead ourselves and sift through what, if anything, is worth hearing.
Not surprisingly, Kohn — a director, ironically, at the Center for Community Change — hasn’t addressed the recent unrest in Iran. Perhaps she’s ashamed. She should be.
How could anyone be unmoved by the bravery of Iran’s young reformers? One wonders how many of the students pictured below, boldly protesting Ahmadinejad in 2007, are dead or incarcerated.
Iranian revolutionaries protesting Ahmadinejad, circa 2007
