Carl Paladino, the Tea Party candidate running as the Republican Gubernatorial candidate in New York, has come to odds with the Jewish Orthodox community who he stood before recently to denounce homosexuality. Paladino said that "children should not be brainwashed" into thinking that homosexuality is acceptable. His history is littered with nasty behavior. He’s forwarded a number of obscene and racist emails, labeled global warming as "a farce", called out his opposition, Andrew Cuomo, for participating in a Gay Pride Parade with his daughters and praised himself as a family values candidate who just happens to have fathered a child with another woman while still married to his wife.
Now he’s angered the Orthodox Jewish community because he issued an apology for the homophobic statements he made in front of the very same group. Rabbi Yehuda Levin, who helped write that speech for Paladino, is angry about the apology. The rabbi asks, “Will we see you next year with your daughter at that gay pride march?”
The conflict comes because Paladino, pretty close to the scum of the earth, needs votes to gain his office seat, while the rabbi does not. With the national media heating up every word Paladino says, he had no choice but to apologize. The crazy and ironic thing is, that’s all he has to do. We’ve created a social and political structure which allows the insane to merely apologize for what they said, despite the fact that it was true and remains so. The new foundation of American fame is that you can get caught saying anything (which is, in fact, the truth of what you believe) and you only have to issue a public apology afterward to be granted immunity.
This will be an interesting election across the nation. Now that Tea Party candidates such as Paladino and Christine O’Donnell are revealing their true nature, yet attempting to vindicate themselves with apologies and soft spoken denial, the integrity of this nation will be further revealed. Will Americans accept these false and ridiculous apologies and elect them anyway, with zero consideration about the current trend to glorify political candidates who are undeniably crazy?
How far will a certain portion of this nation go in order to block the long overdue equality of LGBT Americans? We’ll see…
