Sometimes fortune smiles upon us, no?
Alan Grayson, "The [progressive] Congressman with guts," is drawing all sorts of people into politics, and often, for all the wrong reasons. That can only be good for him.
Meet George Metcalfe, who will be on the November ballot in opposition to Grayson in Florida's 8th Congressional district.
Sorry to make you flip, but I promise, this is worth it.
Rainbow Democratic Club
The advertisement stunned readers of the Florida Bar News.
The headline reads: "What's so gay about it?"
What follows is every vicious stereotype known to homophobia, portraying gays as little better than wharf rats: filthy, diseased and promiscuous.
Leesburg attorney George Metcalfe placed the ad but politely declined to talk about it. Apparently it was in response to the Bar Association's implicit support of a gay foster parent who wants to adopt two children rescued from a crack house.
...
The story began during the 2004 Christmas season, when state social workers brought two brothers to foster parent Frank Gill. They picked him because of his experience and success in dealing with the hard-luck cases.
The boys certainly were that.
John, 4, wore filthy clothes, suffered from a severe case of ringworm and was all but comatose, responding only to his 4-month-old brother, James. He had become James' main caregiver, feeding him and changing his diaper as his parents huffed their drugs.
John shunned affection. He grunted instead of talked. He hoarded food because in the world he came from, it was not a commodity to take for granted.
James was so young, he healed quickly. But it took Gill and his partner, Tom Roe, two years of relentless compassion to reach John. And now both brothers are thriving. They have friends, a school, a safe neighborhood, loving parents and, most of all, structure.
Gill saved their lives.
...
A circuit-court judge agreed, granting Gill permission to adopt the boys. This prompted an appeal from the Attorney General's Office, charged with defending an archaic state law that bans gay adoptions in Florida.
Before moving on, something personal...
From 1971 until 1980, my sister and I were raised in foster homes. And I wish I had the capable, nurturing, supportive and loving guardians that James and John had. Instead, we had emotional problems not dissimilar to those described above, and we ended up bouncing from one foster home to another. It wouldn't take very long for the new family to grow weary of us and push us back into the system.
Eventually, my sister and I were adopted, but things didn't end well there either. Both of us (my sister and I) were turned out of the house and left to fend for ourselves before our 16th birthdays had arrived.
The point here is that Gill has got to be a rare and exceptional person. There is no doubt - not one scintilla - that he's an absolutely amazing parent that deserves to be ranked with Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller's teacher. Florida should be erecting an monument to honor him instead of trying to tear his family apart.
The Liberty Counsel [Metcalfe's organization, ed.] has filed a brief in opposition, along with the Christian Coalition and a small group of conservative pediatricians.
In its argument, the Liberty Counsel states the obvious. The best place for children is with a mother and father. The brief then states that placing the two boys with Gill denies them that ideal.
What the brief doesn't say is that there often are no Ozzies and Harriets lined up for damaged kids, that there were no takers for John and James, which is why Gill has had them so long.
The Liberty Counsel is arguing a fantasy.
Then it makes this absurd statement: "... [T]he Circuit Court detailed the various parenting functions performed by the prospective adoptive parent, including feeding and clothing the children, overseeing their homework and taking them to tennis lessons. As necessary as these functions are, they are not sufficient to provide a family environment that is in the best interest of the child ..."
Can you imagine the effort Gill put into rescuing John? Can you imagine the baggage that boy arrived with and the love and patience required to overcome it? You think your kid is a handful? Imagine a boy who knew only the kind of abuse we couldn't even imagine the first four years of his life.
And the Liberty Counsel reduces this to giving him a pair of pants, filling his cereal bowl and taking him to tennis lessons. I would like to see one member of the Liberty Counsel who has exhibited anything close to this level of Christian compassion exhibited by Frank Gill.
Friday was the filing deadline for this race. There are 7 Republicans competing in their primary, one Tea Party Candidate that will be on the ballot, and George Metcalfe, with No Party Affiliation (and a quixotic write-in bid that won't appear on the ballot).
Honestly though, I want Metcalfe - who paid several thousand dollars to get on the ballot - to be the face of Grayson's opposition. His extreme hate-driven agenda isn't very far removed from that of the "mainstream" Republican Party's; in fact, I'd be surprised if even one Republican candidate disagreed with Metcalfe's brand of "social conservativism".
I'll be writing more about Grayson's other challengers in the coming days.
For now, let's make sure he wins this thing and continues to grow his influence in Congress.
Update [2010-5-3 14:18:51 by Mike Stark]: I saw int he comments that some folks have suggested that we shouldn't be sending so much money to Grayson because he has no legitimate challenger. Two points:
- That's changed in a big way. He's got 3 top-tier challengers that I'll be writing more about soon. For now, you can google Todd Long, Daniel Webster and Bruce O'Donoghue to get the flavor of the legitimate competition. One of those three will win the Republican primary; after that, this race will be nationalized and they will raise millions more.
- Even if Grayson had no legit challenger, the depths of political naiveté in these parts still sometimes astounds me. What kind of message do you think we are sending to other Democrats when we support Grayson with a 7-8 digit war chest? What do you think it does to his influence when he can support or decline to support other candidates around the country with PAC donations from his own war chest? The point is that Washington isn't so different from anywhere else in the world. Money is influence, and the more you have of one, the more you have of the other.
So, once again... For now, let's make sure he wins this thing and continues to grow his influence in Congress.