Sunday, August 29, 2010

Buh Bye Bill



Florida Attorney General and former Gubernatorial Candidate Bill McCollum
(Sun Sentinel)

Tuesday the 24th was my birthday and it was date of the Primary Elections in Florida. Bill McCollum, who currently serves as Florida's Attorney General, was running in the Republican Primary for the gubernatorial candidacy. Readers of the blog will remember that Bill McCollum's office has squandered hundreds of thousands of Florida taxpayer dollars on hiring one George Rekers to give "expert" (boy was that a stretch) witness testimony against the case of Martin Gil, who had adopted his two sons as a result of a landmark ruling by Judge Cindy Lederman. The Florida Department of Children and Families has sought to overturn Lederman's ruling ordering the adoption finalization because of the despicable and discriminatory law that bans gays from adopting in Florida.

Well, I got a great birthday present.

Bill McCollum lost. And he lost, astonishingly, to one Rick Scott, former CEO of Columbia/HCA, a company that paid a $1.7B USD fine (largest in US history) for Medicare fraud to the federal government in 2000. That was some two and a half years after Scott was ousted by Columbia's board of directors after a federal investigation showed Columbia/HCA had committed extensive billing and tax fraud while Scott was at the helm of the organization. 

While I can be glad that it will be easy for a liberal candidate to defeat Scott when more Floridians learn of his history, the main reason I'm glad to see McCollum gone is because of his mindset and rhetoric. Witness comments from his interview earlier this month with Florida Baptist Witness:


Do you support civil rights protections on the basis of sexual preference?
There’s a law in Florida that says that we have, and [as attorney general] I have a Civil Rights Division, that we have a hate crimes issue. And that’s really where that comes in for me. Whether or not somebody is discriminated against on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation or whatever that they should not be. And if somebody commits a crime on that basis, solely on that basis, then they’ve committed a crime. Now we’ve had no reason to enforce a law on the basis of sexual orientation.
I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman. I believe that a family should consist of one man and one woman. I don’t believe in gay adoption. I don’t believe in involving the government in enforcing or encouraging the lifestyle of gays and homosexuals. I just don’t believe that.
You’ve already mentioned that you support the ban on homosexuals to adopt, you’ve defended it in court as attorney general.
I have.
There’s been a scandal in that defense in that one of the expert witnesses has come to have some question about his own personal life – George Rekkers (sic). Do you think the urging by your office to include him in that case has ultimately undermined the ability to defend the law?
No, actually not. I believe that the law is very clear and I think we have a good chance to prevail on it in court. The courts of Florida previously upheld this law. But we’re going through that appellate process right now.
I would never have chosen Rekkers (sic) had I know what we now know today, but the reality is my appellate lawyers – where this is ultimately going, to the state Supreme Court, because that’s what the Department of Children and Families wants, they want to seek a determination of the constitutionality of that law and we’re defending its constitutionality – my appellate lawyers tell me we needed a witness then, and I believed them to be correct, who could introduce materials, studies. Rekkers (sic) was not an authority on this issue. He was an authority in the sense that he was a scholar. He did research into papers that other people wrote. So he was able to be used to get into evidence these matters that we needed. And it’s unfortunate that all this publicity has come up over it, but the lawsuit, I think, is on sound ground and we’re carrying it forward.
Florida permits homosexuals to serve as foster parents. That has been used as an argument to undermine the ban on adoptions. Should homosexuals be permitted to serve as foster parents in Florida?
Well, I personally don’t think so, but that is the law.
Should the law be changed?
I think that it would be advisable. I really do not think that we should have homosexuals guiding our children. I think that it’s a lifestyle that I don’t agree with. I realize a lot of people do. It’s my personal faith, religious faith, that I don’t believe that the people who do this should be raising our children. It’s not a natural thing. You need a mother and a father. You need a man and a woman. That’s what God intended.

Anyone who reads this blog knows how I feel about gay adoption. But leaving aside that issue, does it seem to anyone else that McCollum is slamming single parents as well there? Because it sure looks and reads that way to me. 

But let's take time analyzing the rest of that portion of the interview, shall we?

● Apparent lack of understanding that Civil Rights legislation enforcement deals with more than just Hate Crimes?- check

● Blame-shifting for the waste of hundreds of thousands of Florida taxpayer dollars? - check

● Conflicting statements on Mr. Rekers (Authority, Not an Authority?) - check

● Assumptions that he knows what his God's intentions are? - check

● Bias publicly declared against gays when you're still the acting Attorney General of our state? - checkity, checkity, check.


Mr. McCollum I really can't say buh bye fast enough....


© Bright Nepenthe, 2010

1 comment:

  1. As we used to say in my childhood "good riddance to bad trash".

    ReplyDelete