BOSTON – Former U.S. Rep. Gerry Studds, the first openly gay person elected to Congress, died early Saturday at Boston Medical Center, a hospital official said. He was 69.
Studds, a liberal Democrat who spent more than 20 years in Congress, was censured by the House in the 1980s for having sex with a 17-year-old male page. He was re-elected for several more terms.
All of your jokes (or social commentary) below.
No joke: in 2002 a 65-year-old white male could expect to live 18 years, but gay white men could expect only ZERO to 8 years more. Studds lived four more years, half of the expectation for white gay men.
The gay lifestyle has consequences.
Oh, you can’t reason like that (from general life expectency to an individual’s lifetime.) Gay life expectency is lower than straight because of all the people with HIV.
Of course the gay lifestyle has consequences: You meet a lot of fabulously dressed people!!
If I can’t rely on generalizations when dealing wiht individuals, then what good is all that anti-gay bigotry I have?
It is not only HIV that lowers life expectancy for homosexuals. They tend to suffer from a lot more diseases than heterosexuals, and their suicide rates are much higher.
A long time ago, there was a saying among political types that no politicans career could survive being found with a dead girl or a live boy. That was before Studds and Kennedy.
What? Bigotry? Do you mean like the comments here?
See, it doesn’t work. My anti-mouse agenda falls flat once I’m forced to confront an individual with all of his normal complexities.
Well, I can disagree or not with the propriety of geezer’s posting those statistics here, and you can disagree with the propriety of my joke about the jokes that will appear in these comments, but if the statistics are correct, then it’s hard to disagree with them, though you may disagree about what they mean.
We don’t know what killed the man. I personally have no problems with gays. The godfather of one of my children is gay. I don’t care if Karl Rove is gay. I do have a problem with people taking advantage of youngsters, regardless of their sexual preferences or political affiliations.
Hey, actus actually made a clever joke. That’s the spirit, buddy. I don’t think people would mind you so much if you got a sense of humor.
So……
Will the democrats have a big turnout for his funeral? Will we see Pelosi there?
Wow, am I really the first to question the timing?
Okay, well, here goes:
I question the timing. Obviously, he was murdered by Rove to get Studds’ name and exploits back in the news so the Rethuglikkkans could give some cover to Foley.
I believe that 99% of the people that oppose the gay agenda do so because they believe the gay lifestyle is destructive to individuals and society, not because they hate gay people.
But what is really at issue here is the hypocracy of the left. Although they encourage the gay agenda, if it is a Republican that is gay, they point, laugh, and mock. When a Democrat does what Foley tried to do, they re-elect him and give him standing ovations. But for the Republicans, the whole party is branded as immoral and corrupt, even though the man was immediatley booted from office.
Personally, I don’t know how Democrats can look at themselves in the mirror anymore.
Is that Rove’s October surpise?
Studds Dies at 69
Hey! It doesn’t say how he died!
Oh, er, never mind.
Thanks for finding that, Angie. Sorry you’re under the weather.
That may be the most horrifying mental image ever.
I feel a little bad making jokes and laughing at other people’s jokes when the guy is, y’know, DEAD. Then I remember I’m a horrible person and it is all okay.
Studds Dies at 69
Correction
Studds Dies OF 69
I feel a little bad making jokes and laughing at other people’s jokes when the guy is, y’know, DEAD. Then I remember I’m a horrible person and it is all okay.
I’m more horribler than you, because that aspect didn’t even occur to me. There’s a joke in there… I said to myself, must…find…it.
Although technically I’m laughing at the headline, rather than the man. There, that makes it all better.
They dont’ hate them. They just know better and are going to use the law to prove it.
hmmmm, this sounds sooooo familiar. something to do with education? health care? retirement? wait, wait, it will come to me.
Charlie (Colorado)—Actually, there are numerous gastrointestinal ailments that are much more prevalent among the gay community than the straights. You can’t back the plumbing up indefinitely…
Appears that he died of an embolism from throwing a clot in his lung.
Hopefully have a decent public policy.
Oh, I love actus on the moral high-horse… because of the hypocrisy.
See, I take a personal day and people need a refresher course.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:
Why do the regulars at PW ignore actus above all others?
Good question. The short answer is that he is to be ignored because he is a chronic dissembler, a sewer-dwelling weasel, utterly lacking in common decency. But perhaps some backstory is in order.
This is the guy who was excusing Jeff Goldstein’s blog-stalker. Let’s review the history. When Paterrico blogged the topic, the loathesome Liberal Avenger’s response was:
Patterico responded:
Then actus jumped in:
Keep in mind, actus has been to law school and knows that mental illness does not excuse criminal conduct unless the person does not know right from wrong, as Frisch admits she does. But what did he write?
actus tries to pretend he didn’t write that, claiming that what he said was that “she was so wrong as to appear crazy!†That’s dissembling, because he knows mental illness generally does not excuse sociopatic conduct, let alone the appearance of mental illness. Other lefties, like criminal defense attorney Jerilyn Merritt were able to simply condemn this sociopathy without excuse; actus was not, which speaks volumes.
The other reason you know it’s dissembling is because it fits the actus modus operandi. Regular PW readers and regular Patterico readers know that actus goes to both places to snark in order to pick ridiculous fights. It’s what he does. For that matter, note that he did so at Patterico, not here at PW, where it might well have gotten him banned in the heat of the moment. He knew exactly what he was doing, and so does every regular reader at both blogs.
The actus modus operandi is also on display in a later thread at Patterico, in which he defends GiGi’s fabricated garbage about Rush Limbaugh and underage prostitutes.
Everyone should visit the thread where I confronted actus with his vile garbage to enjoy the spectacle of the loathsome little creep melting down into a puddle of laughable dissembling, profanity and otherwise childish behavior.
This bit is nice also, in which actus tries to pretend he’s not comfy defending GiGi’s fabricated filth, only to be confronted with what he actually wrote, which, for the record, was:
Mind you, he has no sort of direct evidence about teenage prostitutes, but maintains it’s not baseless. And note that he does not condemn the admitted sleaze.
Above the entertainment value to regular PW visitors, the linked threads should inform any new visitors that the odds of having a reasonable discussion with this mope are slim to none, with slim already on the train, heading out of town.
This is why the PW regulars deal with actus as they do. It’s really not even ignoring so much as shunning him due to his chronic bad-faith dissembling, his apparent comfort defending the indefensible, his (as RiverCocytus put it) “spittle, splutter and spindoctoring.â€Â
Or, as Christoph susccintly put it at Patterico:
Regular PW readers and regular Patterico readers know it. And now folks just stopping by know it.
I’d say more so than generally. I’d say pretty much mostly. I’ve heard that insanity defenses are pretty tough.
Yet this is what actus wrote:
It’s this sort of transparent dissembling that has earned him his rep as a sewer-dweller.
BTW, his next likely step is to point to some subsequent dissembling comment he wrote to try to airbrush the original comment just quoted. Or perhaps come up with some new dissembling.
Exactly. Insanity defenses are rough. She’s likely to be found guilty, not insane.