Posted on 05/30/2013 12:23:20 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Some disappointed activists say they are yanking their support for the Democratic Party after Senate Democrats opposed a proposal in an immigration bill that would have allowed citizens to bring their foreign-born, same-sex spouses to the United States.
Jonathan Lewis, a Miami philanthropist who donated more than $35,000 in 2012, has stopped giving and is urging others to do the same until President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats stop breaking promises to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.
"Now is the time to stop investing in Democratic cowardice and stand proud by withholding donations until we see our friends' actions and deeds align with their rhetoric," Lewis said in an email to Reuters.
"Pretty words about fairness and equality under the law from the president and Democrats in Congress do not absolve them from their moral duty to act," he said.
Obama won points with activists when he endorsed same-sex marriage while running for re-election last year and then referred to it in his inauguration speech in January. Now almost every Democrat in the Senate and a few Republicans have come out supporting same-sex marriage.
But Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee helped keep a proposal out of a sweeping immigration overhaul that would have allowed citizens to petition for their same-sex spouses to immigrate to the United States - the same way that heterosexuals can be reunited with their spouses.
WAVERING SUPPORT
This comes as Obama has so far declined to sign an executive order barring federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation.
Shortly before voting to pass the bill out of committee on May 21, several committee Democrats said they could not support the amendment offered by Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy. They said they feared it would kill the entire immigration legislation.....
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Go homo or go home! Wait....
Leftist activist groups must understand that they are only useful for a short time and an immediate purpose. If other political pressures arise, they will find themselves under the bus. That’s because Democrats have tactics, but not principles.
They can call it the Gary Glitter Amendment.
Major Hissy Fit in 3....2....1....
I guess Rachelle Younglai “forgot” to mention that Jonathan Lewis is the son of president and CEO of Ohio-based Progressive Insurance, the 63-year-old Peter Lewis...
Jonathan D. Lewis, Board Member
Jonathan D. Lewis is the president of Jonathan Lewis & Associates, an independent design, development and project management consulting firm. He has successfully developed, managed and financed multiple award-winning restaurants and hotels. In 2004, Lewis created a political funding partnership with his father that funded dozens of LGBT equality and youth empowerment organizations to further progressive values and inspire a new generation of leaders. The political partnership has spent almost $20 million on this focus area. Along with many other current philanthropic efforts, he helped found GetEQUAL, a direct action group that fights relentlessly for LGBT equality, and funds a multi-year scholarship at the Point Foundation, which is awarded to students who demonstrate promise as future leaders.
http://www.afer.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Lewis_Jonathan.jpg
Jonathan Lewis, age 39, is no slouch at business himself: He’s part owner of one of Coconut Grove’s most popular restaurants, Cafe Tu Tu Tango.
******
Mystery Cruise
The Lone Ranger gets set for a round-the-world voyage with one of America’s last great eccentrics at the helm
Jun 19 1997
Next time you think the American working man has lost his hustle, visit Terminal 12 at the Port of Miami. Day and night for six solid weeks, painters, carpenters, and marine electricians have been working like whirling dervishes turning a giant ocean-going tugboat into a luxury yacht. There aren’t any coffee breaks on this construction site, and the work doesn’t stop for thunderstorms. A placard near the gangway reads, “July 15th, we’re outta here!”
Workers (and a pair of armed Wackenhut guards) say they aren’t allowed to talk about the tug, its destination, or the immutable deadline. But secrets on the waterfront are hard to keep. According to a pair of loose-lipped crew members, the five-million-dollar Lone Ranger plans to circumnavigate the globe, and it recently topped off its tanks with a staggering 50,000 gallons of diesel fuel. First stop on the two-year voyage: the Great Lakes. After that, Spain, according to the two sailors.
Why all the secrecy? “The owner is a very private person,” says the renovation foreman, who identified himself only as Chris.
That statement would surely lead to chuckles, if not guffaws, were it to be repeated in certain boardrooms and boudoirs, for the mysterious owner of the Lone Ranger is Peter Benjamin Lewis, one of America’s most outrageous and outspoken corporate iconoclasts.
1995 profile published in Fortune magazine:
How’s your health?’
“’Well, I really don’t know,’ answered Lewis in his agreeable, matter-of-fact way, ‘because I don’t believe in doctors. But No. 1, I feel fine. No. 2, I swim a mile every day. And No. 3, I’m single, so I get laid all the time.’”
Lewis has spent the past seven years noodling with California architect Frank Gehry over the design of a 25,000-square-foot mansion he plans to build in Ohio. Meanwhile he maintains a luxury apartment in Cleveland, as well as residences in Washington, New York, and Aspen, Colorado. He doesn’t need a house in Miami because his son lives here. Jonathan Lewis, age 39, is no slouch at business himself: He’s part owner of one of Coconut Grove’s most popular restaurants, Cafe Tu Tu Tango. In recent weeks Lewis the younger has been a frequent visitor to Terminal 12, helping prepare the Lone Ranger for action.
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/1997-06-19/news/mystery-cruise/
Now their going to give to Republicans.
American Foundation for Equal Rights
Board of Directors
Bruce Cohen, President
Bruce Cohen is an Academy Award-winning and Emmy-nominated producer of film, television, theater and live events.
Michele Reiner, Treasurer
An accomplished photographer, producer, and children’s advocate, Reiner co-founded Parents’ Action for Children (formerly the I Am Your Child Foundation). She produced the prime-time ABC special “I Am Your Child” and worked with Newsweek to produce a special parenting issue dedicated to early-childhood issues.
Dustin Lance Black, Board Member
Lance Black is an award-winning screenwriter, director and producer. He won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for MILK and was a writer and producer of the acclaimed TV series Big Love.
Chad Griffin, Board Member
Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign
Jonathan D. Lewis, Board Member
Jonathan D. Lewis is the president of Jonathan Lewis & Associates
Kenneth B. Mehlman, Board Member
Kenneth B. Mehlman is the global head of public affairs for Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co (KKR), a leading global alternative asset manager. Prior to joining KKR, Mehlman was a partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld
Rob Reiner, Board Member
Actor and director Rob Reiner has been a leader in elevating the issue of pre-Kindergarten education and other services for children ages 0 to 5. He chaired the campaign to pass Prop. 10, the California Children and Families Initiative
Advisory Board
Robert A. Levy, Co-Chair
Robert A. Levy is chairman of the Cato Institute
John Podesta, Co-Chair
John Podesta is the Chair and Counselor of the Center for American Progress.
Julian Bond
From his college days as a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to his recent chairmanship of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
Margaret Hoover
Margaret Hoover is a CNN Political Contributor
Dolores Huerta
Dolores Huerta, president of the Dolores Huerta Foundation, co-founded the United Farm Workers of America with Cesar Chavez, and is a recipient of the U.S. Presidential Human Rights Award
Cleve Jones
Cleve Jones founded the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt
David Mixner
Author, political strategist and civil rights activist David Mixner’s career spans the McGovern presidential campaign to those of Gary Hart and Bill Clinton.
Stuart Milk
Stuart Milk, the openly gay nephew of the late San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk
Hilary Rosen
Hilary Rosen is editor-at-large at Huffington Post and a political contributor on CNN
Judy Shepard
Judy and Dennis Shepard founded the Matthew Shepard Foundation in memory of their 21-year old son, Matthew
http://www.afer.org/about/leadership/
The Gay Mafia That’s Redefining Liberal Politics
By John Cloud/Beverly Hills Friday, Oct. 31, 2008
http://img.timeinc.net/time/daily/2008/0810/360_wcabinet_1110.jpg
A few weeks before Virginia’s legislative elections in 2005, a researcher working on behalf of a clandestine group of wealthy, gay political donors telephoned a Virginia legislator named Adam Ebbin. Then, as now, Ebbin was the only openly gay member of the state’s general assembly. The researcher wanted Ebbin’s advice on how the men he represented could spend their considerable funds to help defeat anti-gay Virginia politicians.
Ebbin, a Democrat who is now 44, was happy to oblige. (Full disclosure: in the mid-’90s, Ebbin and I knew each other briefly as colleagues; he sold ads for Washington City Paper, a weekly where I was a reporter.) Using Ebbin’s expertise, the gay donors — none of whom live in Virginia — began contributing to certain candidates in the state. There were five benefactors: David Bohnett of Beverly Hills, Calif., who in 1999 sold the company he had co-founded, Geo-Cities, to Yahoo! in a deal worth $5 billion on the day it was announced; Timothy Gill of Denver, another tech multimillionaire; James Hormel of San Francisco, grandson of George, who founded the famous meat company; Jon Stryker of Kalamazoo, Mich., the billionaire grandson of the founder of medical-technology giant Stryker Corp.; and Henry van Ameringen, whose father Arnold Louis van Ameringen started a Manhattan-based import company that later became the mammoth International Flavors & Fragrances.
The five men spent $138,000 in Virginia that autumn, according to state records compiled by the nonprofit Virginia Public Access Project. Of that, $48,000 went directly to the candidates Ebbin recommended. Ebbin got $45,000 for his PAC, the Virginia Progress Fund, so he could give to the candidates himself. Another $45,000 went to Equality Virginia, a gay-rights group that was putting money into many of the same races.
The group that donated the money to use against Black and the others is known as the Cabinet, although you won’t find that name on a letterhead or even on the Internet. Aside from Bohnett, 52; Gill, 55; Hormel, 75; Stryker, 50; and Van Ameringen, 78, the other members of the Cabinet are Jonathan Lewis (49-year-old grandson of Joseph, co-founder of Progressive Insurance) and Linda Ketner, 58, heiress to the Food Lion fortune, who is running for Congress against GOP Representative Henry Brown Jr. of South Carolina.
Ketner’s is something of a long-shot bid — her district has been reliably Republican for years — but recently Congressional Quarterly described her “suddenly strong run” against Brown as “the biggest surprise” in this year’s House races. Ketner, who was invited to join the all-male Cabinet as a way of diversifying it, declined to discuss her role in the group.
Among gay activists, the Cabinet is revered as a kind of secret gay Super Friends, a homosexual justice league that can quietly swoop in wherever anti-gay candidates are threatening and finance victories for the good guys. Rumors abound in gay political circles about the group’s recondite influence; some of the rumors are even true. For instance, the Cabinet met in California last year with two sitting governors, Brian Schweitzer of Montana and Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, both Democrats; political advisers who work for the Cabinet met with a third Democratic governor, Wisconsin’s Jim Doyle. The Cabinet has also funded a secretive organization called the Movement Advancement Project (MAP), which a veteran lesbian activist describes as the “Gay IRS.” MAP keeps tabs on the major gay organizations to make sure they are operating efficiently. The October 2008 MAP report notes, for example, that the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force fails to meet Better Business Bureau standards for limiting overhead expenses.
Now why would homosexuals be promoting polygamy? Hmmmmm....
Where does Charlie “Green Iguana” Crist fit in there?
All a ruse...EVERYONE knows that the money will flow after Amnesty is passed - the key now is to make the Dems look a bit ‘moderate’ in being against the gay stuff.
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