Equality, Despite Our Differences.
Editor’s Note: David Mailloux is an LGBT activist and an organizer with Join the Impact Massachusetts. He was an organizer for the National Equality March in Washington D.C., and was also part of the coordinating committee for the Maine LGBT Civil Rights March. I’m proud to have co-founded The Great Nationwide Kiss-In with David, and could not have done it without him. David’s first guest post here was, “Dear Crate and Barrel Ultimate Wedding Contest Coordinators: I Have A Dream…“
I’ve been choking on the same couple of grains of rice since dinner, which was roughly an hour ago.
Mom and I decided on tempura vegetables and rice for dinner tonight, and we were watching CNN at the same time. Janice Langbehn – the Seattle woman who was forced to sit in the waiting room of a Miami hospital with her adopted children as her partner, and the children’s mother, lay dying in a nearby hospital room – was speaking about President Obama’s recent decision to allow all unmarried partners visitation rights in hospitals. Langbehn was recalling the pain of not being able to say goodbye to Lisa, the love of her life, and my mother was shaking her head with disgust. “That’s just not right,” she said. “There’s no reason that should have happened.”
Then, she turned the conversation around to something I had recently said in my Facebook, that I believed in some freedom in relationships, that I would allow for my partner (if I had one) to kiss another man if I knew he was still coming home to me, that the idea physically excited me sometimes. (And, yes, I sometimes forget that my often socially conservative mother is one of 936 Facebook friends and that she often pays close attention to everything I say on there.) That worried her. She supports full LGBT equality because it means her son and his friends will have a better life, but she worries that supporting marriage equality means supporting ideals in some relationships in which she may not believe.
I wanted to tell her that all marriages have quirks, and that a number of them involve different standards than what the right-wing or Christian-religious folks who support only “traditional” marriages between people of the opposite sex will accept. I wanted to remind her that love arrives in all different forms, that sexuality is a beautiful thing that we need to embrace. I wanted to tell her that supporting full LGBT equality didn’t mean she had to support those differences of opinion she might carry. She could support LGBT equality and love between non-related adults of any gender without supporting the differences. The bottom line was believing that my friends who were same-sex couples and who were partnered and wanted to marry had the right to marry.
Instead, I just choked on a couple of grains of rice that had decided to follow the wrong path to my stomach. I’m not terribly fond of aspirating rice, just so you’re aware, and my body is still telling me that as I write this.
The LGBT community is a microcosm of the rest of the world. We are – based on various studies you might read, from conservative “scientists” to Alfred Kinsey and beyond – anywhere from 10 to 30% of the population. We live a life not so different from everyone else. We are just people who were wired differently from birth. If you take a liberal Christian approach, we were all created by God and he made us this way. The conservative Christian approach suggests we are afflicted with a deviant hedonism that will lead to the downfall of humanity.
In my mind, we’re all just people. I wouldn’t dare jump into your dinnertime debates and challenge your ideals. Please don’t do the same to me. My philosophy, at the end of the day, can be summed up in just a few words: live and let live.
The lead editor of this extraordinary blog that I’ve been following for a year now is David Badash. In a phone conversation earlier this month, somewhere in between discussing boyfriends and love interests and whether or not I should buy an iPhone or a Blackberry (and David B loves his iPhone, so you know), he invited me to be part of this awesome world of his. And I accepted immediately, and he was truly excited. We’d known each other for nearly a year, when I had started my own blog, and we shared a mutual admiration for one another almost from the get-go.
But we’re very different people. He kept going with the blog, and I discussed the volume and occasional audacity of the grassroots. Neither of us has looked back, We press forward with the same passion we had since day one.
While I love him like a brother and we respect each other immensely, we both follow a different path when it comes to activism, the fight for full LGBT equality. His blog and his quiet socializing and strategizing with other brothers in the fight are how he works toward our common goal. Personally, I love to stand in the middle of the street with homemade signs and scream and chant and dance. I have plans to get arrested in the very near future, because I am loud and crass and angry.
We are very different. He has my utmost respect, and I’m pretty certain I have his. I don’t attack him or concern myself with his approach. He doesn’t question me. We know that what we do, every day, still brings us that much closer to our dream.
Live. And let live.
My friends Jonathan and Gregory – two of the dearest people I know – have dinner with politically-minded professional activists from the land of Gay, Inc. (that’s what some of us grassroots folks call the professional organizations who choose dinner parties over getting their hands dirty). Yet, they also adore Robin McGehee, the gorgeous, soft-spoken Mississippi native and mother of two who recently got herself arrested in front of the White House while chaining Lt. Dan Choi to the Obama’s wrought iron fence. They – that’s Jon and Greg, by the way – support whatever it takes to make our equality happen. They believe in the battle, regardless of how we choose to fight. They like Joe Solomonese, the Director of the HRC, as much as they like Robin McGehee.
They believe that we must live and let live.
My mother may disagree with how I express my sexuality sometimes, and Jon & Greg might not ever join me in the middle of the street as I scream at the top of my lungs, and David B may never get arrested alongside me in our struggle, but we all have that love in our hearts and souls and we desperately want a beautiful conclusion to this war in which we’re – passively or actively or somewhere in between – fighting for our lives or the lives of those we love. We all carry a common mindset.
And I look at the conservative Christians who claim the bible tells them something it truly doesn’t, but I can’t tell them differently. And I try to look into the eyes of the politicians who know, deep in their hearts, that supporting us is the right thing to do, but fear the wrath of their constituents when the ballot boxes are looking to be stuffed with their realities in November. And I pray to the journalists and the talking heads on CNN and the political pundits who occupy low-backed chairs and whose makeup melts among the bright lights of a studio elsewhere in the mediasphere. I want to believe that those among the intelligentsia are all thinking the same thing, and that they somehow make those beliefs known to the millions of hungry consumers throughout our great country.
We can all respect one another, despite our differences. I don’t have to agree with you and you don’t have to agree with me. But all I’m asking, as the great Aretha once wailed in soulful and musical desperation, is for a little respect. I will respect you. I will always give you that which you believe. I just want you to let me live my life.
Let me live the way God created me, just as everyone has let you live the way God created you. There is enough room in this world for both conservative Christian beliefs, and fluid sexuality, not to mention everything in between. There is room for chicken piccata and Armani, as well as torn jeans and hoarse screams on street corners – and everything else in between.
I am not saying we all have to get along. I am asking that you just let me live. That’s all I want.
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Maine Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Graham Platner is under fire after releasing a video declaring that new allegations against him are false, yet he is “taking time to reflect” on a path forward.
Politico on Monday afternoon reported that a woman who dated Platner, Jenny Racicot, “says he forced her to have sex with him nearly five years ago despite her repeated objections, an allegation Platner denies.”
“Racicot said she had an on-and-off relationship with Platner,” Politico reported, “for more than two years before he entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. She said she cut off contact with him after telling him the encounter was not consensual.”
In a video posted to social media eleven minutes after the Politico story dropped, Platner says, “I wanted to directly address the troubling, serious, and false allegations against me. Any accusation of nonconsensual behavior is categorically false.”
He said he and his supporters “were united in a love of Maine, a belief that our politics must change, in a focus on defeating Susan Collins.”
“So, regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful the political reality will inflict, we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward for the state that I love, the people that I love, the movement I belong to, and the goal of defeating Susan Collins.”
“Those were the goals when we launched this campaign. And they remain my goals today.”
“Throughout it all, you never turned your back on me. And I will not turn my back on you now. Every one of you deserves to see that vision come to fruition and see Susan Collins defeated. And we will use every tool at our disposal to do so.”
The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, a political commentator who served as the communications director for the Jeb Bush 2016 presidential campaign, blasted Platner.
“I’m sorry but ‘we are taking time to reflect on the best path forward’ is not an option on the table,” Miller wrote. “Either it’s false and you campaign with vigor or it’s true and you get out / apologize to everyone you let down.”
Journalist Ryan Grim, commenting on Platner’s video, noted that Platner “strongly suggests he is considering dropping out. Already Troy Jackson and Chellie Pingree, both gubernatorial candidates, are being kicked around in Maine circles as potential replacements.”
Several others, including Puck News’ Peter Hamby, predicted Platner will be dropping out.
Platner had postponed several campaign events before the Politico story was published.
— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) July 6, 2026
President Donald Trump is facing backlash after posting a video of children — including showing their unblurred faces — graduating from kindergarten, with some of the girls purportedly wearing hijabs.
“President Trump posted a captionless video of graduating kindergarteners on Truth Social on Monday, goading his supporters into verbally attacking little children simply for being Muslim,” The New Republic reported. “The clip is from Gateway STEM Academy, a majority-Black K-8 public charter school in St. Paul, Minnesota. It shows about 21 children in caps and gowns on stage singing a song together. Most of the girls are wearing hijabs.”
The original post of the video which Trump reposted reads: “Public school in St. Paul, Minnesota. Every girl is in a hijab … in kindergarten.”
Trump did not add any comments. TNR called the post “Islamophobic, weird, and creepy,” while noting that the comments section of Trump’s post was filled with calls “by racist, xenophobic MAGA supporters” to “deport the children and ban hijabs.”
TNR also noted that it “should come as no surprise that Trump isn’t above attacking children who just learned how to read, but this post is still particularly discomforting—and will certainly contribute to the already potent level of anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. and in Minnesota.”
Critics blasted Trump.
“There is something deeply unsettling about the president of the United States—the most powerful person in the world—going after kindergarten schoolchildren in Minnesota because they wore hijabs, as Trump has done this morning on his website,” The Bulwark’s Sam Stein wrote.
One social media commentator wrote, “Trump posted an unblurred video of more than a dozen Muslim kindergartners to Truth Social, exposing the children’s faces while targeting them for their religion.”
Another added, “Trump is a bigot. The president took to Truth Social to attack kindergarteners in hijabs. These are little kids. The president isn’t just a bigot, he’s also a coward.”
The original video was posted to the X social media platform in June.
U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) at the time commented, “If you are in a public school in America, you should be speaking english.”
Image via Reuters
President Donald Trump’s apparent efforts to delay releasing the $5.8 million civil judgment to E. Jean Carroll are being met with a warning by the journalist’s legal team, who suggest there could be a legal maneuver for Trump to employ to forgo paying the judgment in either of the two cases he lost.
According to The Guardian, on July 4, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered Trump to release the $5.8 million judgment, which is in escrow, to Carroll by this coming Tuesday — or explain why he would not do so.
Carroll’s attorneys think Trump may be trying to buy time to mount another legal strategy, telling the judge that Trump’s request for an extension “appears to be little more than yet another play for time.”
“The case is separate from Trump’s appeal of a Manhattan civil jury’s 2024 award of $83.3m to Carroll for defamation,” The Guardian explains. “But her lawyers have suggested a legal scenario in which the president might seek to conjoin the cases and further delay payment of both.”
Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan (no relation to the judge) wrote, “We can only assume that defendant is seeking … to buy time so he can try to concoct some new basis to put off paying plaintiff presumably in connection with his forthcoming petition and motion for a rehearing.”
Trump’s former attorney, Justin Smith, in one of his final acts, wrote to the Supreme Court suggesting that his client would be appealing the $83.3 million civil judgment.
Smith argued that the Supreme Court “may wish to consider the petitions together,” given they involve the same parties.
The larger judgment case involves possible questions of presidential immunity, and that has Carroll’s attorneys concerned.
“A conjoined case, Carroll’s lawyers fear, could result in both judgments being wiped out,” The Guardian reports.
The president has also made clear he is no fan of Judge Kaplan, after the jurist made several rulings that “angered” Trump.
“What else can you expect from a Trump Hating, Clinton appointed judge, who went out of his way to make sure that the result was as negative as it could possible be,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in 2023, “speaking to, and in control of, a jury from an anti-Trump area which is probably the worst place in the US for me to get a fair ‘trial’.”
Image via Reuters
Platner Scorched Over ‘Taking Time’ Video After New Accusation
Trump Sparks Fury Online After Posting Unblurred Video of Muslim Kindergartners in Hijabs
One Legal Maneuver Threatens to Undo Everything E. Jean Carroll Won
Inside the Group Helping MAGA Voters Walk Away — And What Finally Pushed Them
