It seems a particularly relevant morning to revisit Melissa Etheridge’s song honoring Mark Bingham, one of the four men who are given credit for bringing down Flight 93 in rural Pennsylvania so it wouldn’t make it to the Pentagon. Mark Bingham was a gay man.
This morning we try to recover from last night’s GOP Tea Party debate in Tampa. Richard Adams of the Guardian provides a merciful summary for those of us unable to stomach watching it. You can scroll down to 8:00 p.m. when the debate actually starts. Gay rights were not discussed at all, as those won’t really become an issue until a Republican faces a Democrat. But we should all know that the Republican position on the issue hasn’t changed much since the 1950s.
Perhaps the most revealing moment of the debate came when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked candidate Ron Paul who should pay for the hospital care of an uninsured man suddenly critically ill. When Paul hedged, Blitzer asked if he should just be allowed to die. Several members of the audience yelled, “Yes!” There’s a brief video of the exchange here.
These people scare me way more than Al Qaeda.
Lisa Roney
Joyous Crybaby 
It was an interesting exchange. Ron Paul at least tried to say that there are other ways to care for people. I don’t agree with his answers, but at least he didn’t think that the right answer was, as Alan Grayson so incisively put it, to “die quickly”. I would have wished, though, that the candidates would have risen up as one and condemned the idea that anyone would be left to die because of a lack of insurance. That, unfortunately, seems beyond this slate of American heroes.