Dave Maass

Watch this interview. But, before you do, let me set the stage.

We all appreciate the civil rights milestone that was the election of Barack Obama. But while the O was campaign, Rachel Maddow was already making history as the first openly gay news host to score a prime-time cable news show. The man on her show tonight is Richard Cohen, a former gay man who is now the leader of the dubious “conversion therapy” movement, which purports to help gay people abandon homosexual behavior through Christian counseling.

Here’s what’s at stake in this interview: Cohen’s movement has been tied to a piece of legislation in Uganda that would make homosexuality punishable by life imprisonment, being gay and having HIV would be punishable by death and friends and family of gay people who don’t report them to the authorities could case seven years in prison. Lest you forget your history, that is, without hyperbole, Nazi-level oppression.

So, yeah….I was a guest on the KNME current events show In-Focus, specifically the panel discussion, “The Line”:

You’ll want to skip to 8:50 to get to the good stuff. The first segment is about Albuquerque ditches and ditch boards and, as you might imagine, I had absolutely nothing to say about either.

I did however jabber on LGBT rights, reverse racism, the Chinese and the death penalty.
Sometimes, though, watching these embedded things, I wonder about my internal filter. I never took that poke at Joe Monahan, but I did get to correct Whitney Cheshire.

Props to Kathy Wimmer at KNME, host Gene Grant and the rest of the fine regular panel. A special terrorist fist jab to Jim Scarantino and Gene for giving me lifts to and from the station.

Cross-posted at SFReeper.com