California Democrats and left-leaning gay activists are up in arms over a quip last weekend by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of the most pro-gay governors in the nation (just how many top Democrats have gone on national TV and said they have "no problem" with legal gay marriage?).
In a speech about the state's stalled budget, Schwarzenegger joked of the Democrat-controlled legislature: "[i]f they don't have the guts to come up here in front of you and say, 'I don't want to represent you, I want to represent those special interests, the unions, the trial lawyers' ... if they don't have the guts, I call them girlie men."
The phrase, of course, comes from an old recurring "Saturday Night Live" skit in which Arnold-style, Austrian-accented body builders say it ubiquitously. But now out come the language police, declaring that the governor's use of the SNL parody line, in which he's making fun of his own reputation for muscleheadedness, is "homophobic" and "sexist."
"It's really painful to hear the governor resort to such blatant homophobia," Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica), an open lesbian, told the Los Angeles Times, doing her best to parody a hopeless politically correct, censorious, grievance-collecting liberal. "There are many people who are very upset and think he owes an apology to women and to the gay community," said gay Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco. I'm just waiting for the governor's liberal opponents to label his jibe racist and anti-poor, but I'm sure they're working on that one, too.
Democrats are now using the brouhaha to fight the governor's budget reforms and defend their gutless pork-barrel ways. "Why would I possibly call him?" said Democratic Senate leader John Burton. "Why in God's name would I call him? I mean, I'm not that much of a girlie man."
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California's Jeff Bissiri:
"The Governor's use of the term 'girlie man' was not a slur aimed at the gay and lesbian community and Senator Kuehl knows that", Bissiri stated. "Where was her outrage when the [Democratic gubernatorial candidate Cruz] Bustamante campaign referred to candidate Schwarzenegger as a 'sissy' for not agreeing to an endless series of debates?" Bissiri added.
Where indeed? For his part, Schwarzenegger
now says the legislators are "acting like children" (whoops,
call out the Children's Defense League) in order to protect the
trial lawyers, unions and other special interests who are dug in at
the Capitol "like Alabama ticks" (let's add the ASPCA and the
Alabama Cultural Heritage Committee to the list of
offendees).