"We are thrilled, ecstatic and overjoyed that Rick Santorum has been thrashed at the polls. His extreme and gratuitous homophobia will no longer pollute the Senate. Good riddance."
Matt Foreman, Executive Director, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
"Senator Santorum made a career out of marginalizing gay and lesbian families. Pennsylvanians rejected this strategy and turned their backs on the politics of division. This should be a lesson to all Republican leaders: Voters want to support candidates who appeal to their best hopes, not their worst fears."
Log Cabin's Pennsylvania state chairman, Michael Stara, Nov. 9.
"It became clear to me that there was a culture in Washington that knew about this activity and condoned it by doing nothing about it."
– Lane Hudson, in a Washington Blade interview, Nov. 9.
Lane Hudson, 29, a South Carolina native who worked for former Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., from 1995 to 2002, said he created an anonymous website called Stop Sex Predators in July in an effort to draw attention to what he called Foley's inappropriate overtures toward teenage pages on Capitol Hill. Hudson briefly worked as an HRC field organizer in Michigan's GOTV work before HRC fired him.
"Besides the sheer scale of the hypocrisy, the Ted Haggard scandal doesn't tell us much we don't already know about closeted gay or bisexual men; closet cases will take enormous risks to get their needs met and will often do great harm to themselves and to those they profess to love. What's new in the Haggard scandal – perhaps we should call it a flameout – is the refusal of Mike Jones, a former male prostitute, to honor the callboy's code of silence, the omert' of gay hookerdom."
– Dan Savage, The New York Times, Nov. 8.
"Some days you couldn't wait to get up to find out who'd been indicted. I miss watching Katherine Harris from Florida wear less and less blue eye-shadow as she went through her Senate race. Well, it's been rank, racist, sleazy, lying and full of insinuating scare tactics. Thank God it's over."
-Molly Ivens, online at www.alternet.org/story/44018/, ÒGoodbye and Good Riddance,Nov. 8.
"The marriage issue is so transformative, and the military issue was so transformative. The -pragmatists, who wanted us to just keep our heads down didn't realize that we needed to do something more important first. We needed to tell our story, we needed to frame the narrative. By framing the narrative around marriage and the military, we framed it on terms we were going to win in the long run. And by showing our competence and courage and self-belief, we would turn the debate around. By diverting attention from the fundamental issue that gay people are fine, gay is good; I think we actually helped (our opponents)."
– Andrew Sullivan on marriage equality, Metro Weekly, Nov. 9.
