Marco Rubio is defending the Florida GOP’s reprehensible ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, adopting the right-wing talking point that the legislation is actually about parental rights, Washington Blade reports.
But as Daily Kos’ Marissa Higgins has succinctly written, the bigoted legislation is in reality about “stamping out LGBTQ+ identities, people, and histories from public school classrooms,” and Marco Rubio knows that perfectly well. Of course, his enthusiastic support for this anti-LGBT law is no surprise. Disgusting, but no surprise.
It’s a waste of time to expect better from a man who in 2006 called adoption by loving same-sex parents a “social experiment.” Oh, but people change, and plenty of Democrats held anti-gay views too, his supporters might insist. Sure, but as of 2015, Rubio had refused to comment on the matter, even after the courts “effectively struck down the gay adoption ban in 2010,” BuzzFeed reported.
It’s a waste of time to expect better from a man who as a presidential candidate hired noted homophobe Eric Teetsel, who once “bemoaned the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision as ‘further obscuring the truth about the immorality of homosexuality,’” Think Progress reported in 2015. Teetsel is currently chief of staff to insurrectionist Josh Hawley.
It’s a waste of time to expect better from a man who said he would not seek another term to the Senate, but then used the Pulse mass shooting as an excuse to break that promise.
“I’ve been deeply impacted by it,” Marco claimed, according to a Talking Points Memo report in 2016. “When it visits your home state and it impacts a community you know well, it really gives you pause to think about your service to your country and where you can be most useful to your country." Marco was so, so, so deeply impacted by the murders of LGBT people that he then spoke alongside anti-LGBT activists just weeks later.
One scheduled speaker, Pastor Ken Graves, “preaches against ‘militant homofascism’ that he says ‘seeks to take over our land and make it Sodom’ and argues that gay people cannot build happy families because they are ‘depressed,’” Right Wing Watch reported at the time.
"The event I will be speaking at in Orlando is a gathering of local pastors and faith leaders,” a defensive Rubio would claim in response to criticism, verbally wagging his finger at us in his usual manner. “Leave it to the media and liberal activists to label a gathering of faith leaders as an anti-LGBT event. It is nothing of the sort.” Of course, our bad for looking at the words, actions, and record, and using those to come to a conclusion.
To make the point, The American Independent reports that just days after the Florida GOP approved the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, “Rubio posted a Bible quote from the Book of Isaiah about Sodom and Gomorrah—two ancient cities that LGBTQ rights opponents often cite to condemn same-sex relationships: ‘Hear the word of the LORD, princes of Sodom! Listen to the instruction of our God, people of Gomorrah!’” Is that Sen. Marco Rubio or Pastor Ken Graves?
To mostly quote Marco Rubio, let's dispel once and for all with this fiction that Marco Rubio doesn't know what he's doing. He knows exactly what he's doing.
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