Tag Archives: Frank Rich

“Back in the day, Groucho Marx used to ask if a vaudeville act “will play in Peoria?” — the theory being that Peoria was the ultimate barometer of mass Middle American taste. Schock, as it happens, represented Peoria, a bedrock conservative district, and there is little evidence to suggest that his hijinks, transgressions, and ambiguous sexuality offended his constituents whatsoever. …

“As we just learned, a man can still be murdered for being gay a few blocks away from the Stonewall Inn. But the rapidity of change has been stunning. The world only spins forward, as Tony Kushner wrote. And yet as we celebrate the forward velocity of gay rights, I think we must glance backward as well. History is being …

Speaking to a group at Harvard, New York Times columnist Frank Rich explained that he first came to support gay rights when at the height of the AIDS crisis, an editor asked him to write a lengthy essay on how straight people view gays.

“It still seems an unwritten rule in establishment Washington that homophobia is at most a misdemeanor. By this code, the Smithsonian’s surrender is no big deal; let the art world do its little protests. This attitude explains why the ever more absurd excuses concocted by John McCain for almost single-handedly thwarting the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ are rarely …

“If logic applied to Palin’s career trajectory, this month might have been judged dreadful for her. In an otherwise great year for Republicans she endorsed a ‘Star Wars’ bar gaggle of anomalous and wacky losers — the former witch, Christine O’Donnell; the raging nativist, Tom Tancredo; and at least two candidates who called for armed insurrection against the government, Sharron …

“Thanks to Rekers’s clownish public exposure, we now know that his professional judgments are windows into his cracked psyche, not gay people’s. But there is nothing funny about the destruction his writings and public activities have sown. His fringe views have not remained on the fringe. His excursions into public policy have had real and damaging consequences on a large …

New York Times columnist Frank Rich goes after the Obama administration again today in an essay about the march towards full LGBT rights. Obama has long been, as he says, a fierce advocate for gay equality. The Windy City Times has reported that he initially endorsed legalizing same-sex marriage when running for the Illinois State Senate in 1996. The most …

You’ve got to read Frank Rich’s column in the NYT today in which he eviscerates NOM and the anti-marriage equality movement and says that they’ve lost the fight. A delicious snippet: Far from terrifying anyone, “Gathering Storm” has become, unsurprisingly, an Internet camp classic. On YouTube the original video must compete with countless homemade parodies it has inspired since first …

The reliable Frank Rich writes in today’s NYT: The family-values dinosaurs that once stalked the earth — Falwell, Robertson, Dobson and Reed — are now either dead, retired or disgraced. Their less-famous successors pumped out their pro forma e-mail blasts, but to little avail. The Republican National Committee said nothing whatsoever about Obama’s reversal of Bush stem-cell policy. That’s quite …

NY Times columnist Frank Rich thinks its time to let the Rick Warren thing go and prepare to judge Barack Obama by his deeds. By the historical standards of presidential hubris, Obama’s disingenuous defense of his tone-deaf invitation to Warren is nonetheless a relatively tiny infraction. It’s no Bay of Pigs. But it does add an asterisk to the joyous …