CWA Asks: Why Is Transportation Sec. Mineta Celebrating ‘Gay Pride’ with Taxpayers’ Money?     6/18/2003

Expanded from CWA News Release, June 18, 2003

Contact: Rebecca Riggs: (202) 488-7000 ext. 126

Democrat gay activist compares opponents to ‘cancer’ at DOT event

WARNING: story contains a single graphic description

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Concerned Women for America is questioning why the Bush Administration’s Transportation Secretary, Norman Mineta, gave an award to a radical “gay” and pro-abortion-rights Massachusetts state senator who has a history of strongly opposing the administration’s positions on family issues.

On Tuesday, Sec. Mineta presented Jarrett T. Barrios—Policy Chair for the Massachusetts Democratic Party and a leading homosexual activist in the state—with an honorary plaque after Barrios addressed an official Department of Transportation (DOT) “gay pride” event held at DOT headquarters. The event received DOT, and therefore taxpayer, funding.

In his speech, state Sen. Barrios, the first openly homosexual Latino elected to a state office, linked homosexuality to past civil rights causes and compared critics to “cancer.”

LaBarbera said:

“We expected this sort of taxpayer-funded ‘gay’ activism under Bill Clinton, but not more than two years into the Bush presidency. Secretary Mineta, the only non-Republican in the Cabinet, may be fully in line with the Democratic Party’s embrace of homosexuality, but he’s out of step with his boss. As for Mr. Barrios, to compare defenders of the natural family and marriage to ‘cancer’ is an affront to all taxpaying Americans—and certainly to the millions of Christians and people of faith who helped elect President Bush.”

Sen. Barrios’ record in the Massachusetts legislature includes:

He voted to adjourn rather than take up a state constitutional amendment affirming marriage as between a man and a woman. This action violated the Massachusetts Constitution, which requires that lawmakers vote on proposed amendments receiving the required number of signatures;

He is the lead sponsor of a bill that would create Vermont-type homosexual “civil unions” in the state;

His website declares that Barrios “is the only candidate who has been endorsed by NOW and NARAL,” two leading pro-abortion organizations in America;

In March 2000, sought to squelch an audiotape made by a pro-family group that exposed a state-sponsored “Queer Sex” workshop in Boston in which students as young as 14 were exposed to graphic verbal coaching on how to perform homosexual perversions. When a family group sent the tape out to educate all legislators, Barrios, citing a constitutionally dubious restraining order, responded by sending an email to all “House aides” and “House Reps” telling them that they could not play, listen, distribute or refer to the tape.

On the last point, the surfacing of the audiotape exposing the graphic Boston workshop became known in conservative circles as “Fistgate,” because one of the practices “taught” to the “youth only” session was “fisting”—“gay’ slang for a sadomasochistic act in which a person puts his or her hand, fist and arm up another’s anus or vagina, for sexual pleasure.

Barrios’ cancer analogy

A Department of Transportation official acknowledged to Culture & Family Report that federal (DOT) funds were being spent on the “gay pride” event, but has yet to provide us with answers on the total DOT spending for homosexual celebrations this year.

DOT Sec. Mineta issued a statement in support of June as "gay pride" month, as he has in previous years. DOT was the first federal agency to celebrate homosexual employees, in 1993.

In his Tuesday speech, Barrios, who represents Cambridge and who attended Harvard, used the metaphor of spreading cancer to disparage foes of "civil rights," which he made clear includes homosexuality issues.

LaBarbera, who attended the DOT event, reports that Barrios, after noting that a friend has cancer, said the following:

She was describing to me the way cancer spreads. It metastasizes. … And the doctors don’t know … how a cancer works. They just know that it’s working. It’s somehow working against you. And this is … a metaphor I would describe for those hurdles that are put in our place—those events, those occurrences, those energies that work against some of us achieving that promise.

In citing widely condemned historical events such as the Supreme Court’s pro-slavery Dred Scott decision and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, Barrios said:

There were no reasons given for finding some of our Americans to be not quite full Americans. … There was no reason to that cancer of fear. But like a cancer in your body, it was there, and it’s still here, and it still works against us, even as many of us work to help America reach its full promise….‘Liberty and justice for all’ is for all of us … no matter the color of our skin, no matter our gender or religion or our sexual orientation….

Brian Camenker, president of the Massachusetts-based Parents Rights Coalition—which obtained and then circulated the “Fistgate” tape that then-Rep. Barrios tried to squelch—described him as a “hard-core gay activist” who has a “history of viciously attacking anyone who stands in the way of the homosexual agenda in Massachusetts.”

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