Oak Park trustee Ray Johnson backs up gay pressure on the little coffee shop that would schedule a book author to talk about therapy to make gay people straight.

With no Oak Park village board meeting this Monday, trustee Ray Johnson, who is gay, was at the Buzz. “I did not want the Buzz Café to give a forum to this gentleman who is espousing bigotry and hatred,” Johnson said, noting that Williams stood to profit from the event.

Restaurateur Dennis Murphy, on the other hand, called the pressure tactics (by gays, in this case), “un-American.”

Dennis Murphy, 67, an Oak Park resident and owner of Poor Phil’s, heard about the book discussion through a local political party’s e-mail group. Murphy says he’s not familiar with the specifics of Williams’ stance but said he’s disappointed that the man wasn’t given a chance to speak.

“No matter how distasteful, he still has the legitimate right to express his view,” Murphy said. “And I didn’t like this mob mentality, ganging up on Laura [Maychruk, Buzz proprietor] and preventing something from happening, simply because they disagreed with what the talk would be about. I just found it very un-American.”

The author is Cornelius Williams, who used to live in Oak Park and is a regular at Buzz, which is on Harrison Street in the Arts District.  The book is Transition: From Homosexual to Preacher.  He published it through Author House, an on-line service.

The book at Amazon.com

Murphy is right.  He refers to our accepted ideals of open conversation and free exchange of ideas.  When a popular elected official endorses the opposite, something’s rotten in our village.

This is very serious stuff — a perhaps hurried and offhand approval by a village official, one elected village-wide for all its citizens.  It is only tangentially, if at all, concerned with gay rights or even gay sensibilities.

Another politically active Oak Parker talked the same way, Ann Armstrong, a longtime or at least long ago pillar of the Village Manager Association (VMA), our rarely defeated semi-political party.

People at the café Monday said reparative therapy isn’t worth discussing. They suggested topics where the public could help effect change: civil unions and the military’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy. “Issues where information is useful,” said Ann Armstrong, 67, a straight Oak Parker who has fought for gay rights. “It’s a fool’s errand to think reparative treatment is anything but hypocrisy or snake oil.”

Here is the essence of zeal for an arguably liberal cause gone overboard in violation of liberal principles.  In that respect, it’s not a principled position but a decidedly narrow-scope view of rights.

The whole business deals a harsh setback to the gay-rights movement in Oak Park, which has hitherto enjoyed wide support.

Charles Krauthammer on Fox said the health care townhall protests were hurting their cause, but Gallup says otherwise:

PRINCETON, NJ — More than two-thirds of Americans (69%) are closely following news accounts of town hall meetings on healthcare reform, and while 34% say the protests make them more sympathetic to the protestors’ viewpoints and 21% say the protests make them less sympathetic, almost half either say the protests haven’t affected their views either way or have no opinion.

Charles is not the only one.  So think lots of others within the beltway.

I have long thought the left hijacked the term “liberal.”  This sort of thing confirms my belief:

A book discussion in Oak Park was canceled Monday after the village’s gay community took offense at the subject matter – that there’s a cure for gayness.

With gay community abuzz, event canceled

Later: Are there cafeteria liberals?

Last night the irrepressible Mort Kondracke further graced his Fox News panel slot with a blame-it-on-Limbaugh comment about denunciations of ObamaCare at townhall meetings.

The host Bret Baier had reported a flood of email objections to Kondracke’s and Charles Krauthammer’s slamming of protestors’ behavior — acknowledging neither the indignation it represented nor its grassroots nature.

Something from the urban trenches, Chicago-style:

The intern architect documents his day, excited by the opportunity to turn misfortune into fodder:

7:50am The doors open, and the line floods in from several points, and there is disorder as the line becomes a crowd.  I feel like I may have a chance at the front of the line, but this lasts for three minutes, the line re-forms exactly as it was outside the office.  These are not strangers to this process; they are indoctrinated.  The Dept. of Zoning has not asked these people to come early, they have done so out of necessity, and the response from Zoning has not been to change their protocol, but to open their doors and fill the list for the entire day before any other department even opens.

more more more here

Thanks, Obama . . .

We broke the bank! – Washington Times

Shared via AddThis

. . . with a modest hat tip to GW, truly a piker in the League of Big Spenders.

And hi to children and grandchildren, who will be reaping a whirlwind some day

A liberal friend of mine cancelled her Chi Trib subscription some time back, indignant over its front-page policy of mimicking Sun-Times with sensational grabbers.  The Trib soon thought better of that adventure and at least modified its incipient tabloidism.

But I think something else had her and has other libs cobbed, and it’s John Kass, who combines slam-bang coverage of the Mayordaley II machine with national-framework conservatism.  And I’m not sure which gets them madder, though you’d think the vigilance over Chicago politics would be a no-brainer favorable vote.

Not so, I have come to believe, because so-called social issues and love of government have come to trump all, and Mayordaley II is correct on all related points, willing at least to overlook stuff that sent his father up the wall — race– and gay-related matters come immediately to mind — and love of government remains a rock-solid foundation for him as it was for his father.

His motto could be “Holy mother the state,” to quote Dorothy Day, the reformed Marxist and uncanonized Catholic laywoman saint, and that suits today’s libs.

Anyhow, today’s Kass has MD-2’s “terrifying alter ego” Mayor Chucky, as in horror-movie anti-hero, with

aggravated facial expressions . . . hand waving, great circular motions from the shoulder . . . sneering, the finger pointing, and finally, the angry lip curling

asserting itself in a news conference — scheduled to talk about something else, for gosh sakes!

It happened when Chi Trib reporter Dan Blake and ABC-Channel 7’s Charles Thomas “figured they should act like reporters, not press agents” and asked him about insider-developer (plus Board of Ed President and Olympic committee ethics czar) Michael Scott Sr.’s painfully obvious cashing in on the coming Olympics.

The mayor refused to discuss it.  Blake asked when he would discuss it.

“Oh, I do it every day  . . .  You’ve been with me every day. NEVER insult me with that question! You’re insulting me because every day I’m here, you’re never here. And don’t print that! So I know, you’ll print it.”

Kass:

Huh? What? All Blake asked was a legitimate question about when the mayor would answer a legitimate question.

The mayor discussed it the next day,

but only long enough to deny, deny, deny and say reporters were making it all up just to hurt his feelings and ruin everything. “You come to conclusions, you’re trying to hurt [Olympics year] 2016. I don’t know why. … You come to conclusions!”

Kass:

What will happen if Chicago actually wins the 2016 Olympics?

We’ll have lots and lots of insider deals.

And we’ll have lots of Mayor Chucky.

Kass names Blake and Thomas but not the other mainstreamers on hand going along with the MD-2 program for the day — not his skywalking atop Willis Tower of a day earlier, but infrastructure developments.

Whatever “the stunt of the moment,”

reporters . . . give oodles of coverage to the news managed out of the mayor’s press office.  . . .  And then you see the stunt on TV, the ribbon cutting or the meet-and-greet with the children or the seniors, and you think you’re actually watching the news. [Italics added — it’s why people turn to the ‘Net]

But criticizing fraternity members even anonymously, is to enter dangerous territory.  Kass sounds ominously like those who accuse mainstreamers of bias towards their favorite party and their favorite political philosophy. 

If his reporting on civic corruption isn’t enough to make libs uneasy and send them scurrying to the NY Times comfort zone, his critique of the main stream, even if veiled, would be enough.  You don’t do that in j-circles. 

Probably not in j-schools either, where the first step of the Twelve, “My name is ____ , and I am a biased liberal,” is probably rarely taken.

So it is that Chi Trib, for all its fluff and relative unreadability (vs. Sun-Times, which has its own problems) has this alter ego — not only Kass but a fleet of energetic civic-corruption investigators — that terrifies true-blue liberal readers for whom the state is, sans irony, a holy mother.

This with apologies to those who, like Dorothy Day, reserve that encomium sans irony for the Church of Rome.