Steve Benen Concern Trollery on Lindsey Graham Sexual Orientation

21 Apr, 2010 by Donald Douglas

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The post is really about delegitimizing the tea parties, and especially a recent South Carolina Tax Day Tea Party. As one website put it:

Tea party activists in South Carolina apparently didn’t receive the memo to tone down their incendiary rhetoric, in the wake of death threats and violent acts waged against U.S. lawmakers. A tea party rally held in Greenville over the weekend provided the few thousand in attendance a cornucopia of racism, hate, paranoia, seditious calls to take up arms against the government and anti-gay rhetoric. And the offensive remarks receiving the most attention were those made by the event’s keynote speaker, race-baiting nativist and former U.S. congressman Tom Tancredo. He took to the podium and whipped up the crowd with an anti-Obama racist birther rant: “If his wife says Kenya is his homeland, why don’t we just send him back?”

The rally was organized by the Upcountry Conservative Coalition. The group’s mission statement: “We the People…are coalescing to reclaim our God given rights by restoring our Constitutional Republic.”

But leftists have long attacked Senator Graham on his sexual orientation, often using crude homophobic stereotypes:

Lindsey Graham (R-SC), an unmarried/never married 52 year old with a funny, forced way of walking, has been far more fastidious with his homosexuality. Again, “everyone” knows– except the voters in conservative South Carolina. Not that it doesn’t come up from time to time; people talk. In fact, the head of the Democratic Party in South Carolina said something when the effeminate Lindsey decided to run for Thurmond’s senate seat. “He’s a little too light in the loafers” to succeed Strom Thurmond. Graham got into a really queenie tizzy fit and loudly threatened to sue– although he didn’t. (They never do.)

And thus notice Digby’s total hypocrisy:

In light of the teabaggers’ crude outing of Lindsay Graham, I took a little trip down memory lane and revisited the history of the right wing attacks on gays as threats to national security. I guess that Mad Men craze has unfortunately put McCarthyism back in vogue.

Yeah. Right.

Cross-posted from American Power.