California Democrats walked out of a ceremony at the State Senate on Monday in which Republicans honored former U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell, the first openly gay member of a presidential Cabinet, for Pride month.
Grenell, a longtime Republican activist and foreign policy expert, served in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet as acting National Director of Intelligence. He had previously been the ambassador to Germany, a role in which he distinguished himself by criticizing Germany’s reluctance to honor its funding commitments to NATO. He also urged Germany to confront Iranian terror and to end its dependence on Russian gas for its energy supply.
Democrats walked out, including State Senate President pro Tem Tori Atkins (D-San Diego), and State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), the author of California’s most controversial legislation on LGBT issues.
The Los Angeles Times reported:
“This is their way of celebrating Pride, by bringing in a guy who is truly a self-hating gay man, who takes tons of anti-LGBTQ positions,” Wiener said in an interview in the Capitol on Monday. “There are plenty of gay Republicans who don’t do the unhinged things that [Grenell] does. I’m not lumping all gay Republicans together — he is a particularly vile person.”
…
At a news conference outside the Capitol held by state Republicans to celebrate Grenell, the former Trump administration official lambasted Democratic policies and what he called “the gay left mafia.”
“Inherent in the word ‘tolerance’ is ‘tolerate.’ It doesn’t mean you agree with it, it means that you tolerate someone else’s opinion. That means that you don’t get up and walk out when they are being honored,” he said. “…They just couldn’t be in the same room as someone who annihilates their world view.”
(The Times felt it necessary to take a number of digs at Grenell in its coverage, such as noting that Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, the second openly gay Cabinet member, was confirmed by the Senate.)
Grenell responded to Wiener and other critics on Twitter:
(Grenell’s reference to “pedophilia” has to do with a controversial law Wiener authored that reduces penalties for some cases of statutory rape involving gay men.)
Democrats’ walkout was viewed as a reciprocal gesture after Republicans walked out on a ceremony honoring the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a drag group that often mocks the Catholic Church, earlier this month.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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