Maine Reporter Fired Over Email Sent Attacking Human Rights Campaign
12/09/09-by Bridgette P. LaVictoire
The decision of Larry Grard to attack the Human Rights Campaign for their statement which they released after the defeat in Maine would not have been a problem had it not been that Grard is a reporter. Despite using his personal account, Grard, emailed the HRC media contacts directly stating “who are the hateful, venom-spewing ones? Hint: Not the yes on 1 crowd. You hateful people have been spreading nothing but vitriol since this campaign began. Good riddance!” He did this in response to the statement by the HRC that the loss in Maine was largely due to the hateful advertisement that came from the Christian groups. Grard’s view of the matter, of course, is colored by his own Christian beliefs as the Yes on 1 Campaign often used borderline hate speech and heavy distortions to attack the LGBT Community during the campaign.
Larry Grard was fired after the HRC contacted the Morning Sentinel. At no time did Trevor Thomas, Deputy Director of Communications at the HRC, ask for Grard to be fired, and there does not appear to have been any pressure for him to be fired. In all likelihood, the decision by the HRC to bring this to Morning Sentinel editor Bill Thompson was likely intended to bring about pressure not to do so again. Thomas sent Thompson the following “I received the below email this morning after our national media release was sent to your team. … It’s frankly, just not acceptable coming from a news organization the morning after our defeat.”
According to Grard “They said the Yes-on-1 people were haters. I’m a Christian. I take offense at that. I e-mailed them back and said basically, ‘We’re not the ones doing the hating. You’re the ones doing the hating.’ I sent the same message in his face he sent in mine.”
According to Grard, Thomas demanded that he be fired, though Thomas denies that. The management team at the Morning Sentinel, however, did tell Thomas that they had policies in place with regards to these issues and that they would inquire into it. According to Thomas, he did not know that Grard had been fired until he was asked for a comment upon it.
Grard is busy blaming his dismissal upon his religion rather than upon the merits or the fact that he was using personal email while on the job, something he states is common for journalists.
To be blunt, the probability is that he was dismissed for unprofessional behavior.
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Maine Reporter Fired For Personal Email Against Marriage Equality
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Is the HRC saying that a reporter can not have a political opinion? Or is it saying that a reporter can only have a political opinion the HRC agrees with?
I was in Maine during this election and as you might imagine I was pretty pro marriage equality… but I know things got emotional… and things got said… but if this reporter said them on his time and on his personal e mail account… then he should still have his job.
Shame on the HRC and Shame on his newspaper…
Paula Brooks… Publisher and Executive Editor… Lez Get Real
Actually, from what I could gather, the email itself was more of the problem than anything else. Apparently Grard emailed the HRC people directly and did not email the HRC’s normal lines, and was abusive in his comments.
I don’t understand why Larry Grard is not allowed to respond to an email sent to him accusing him of being part of a hate campaign and still hold onto his job. And don’t tell me that it is beacuse he sent a personal email on company time. I’ve never heard of someone being fired for sending a few, let alone one, personal emails during work hours. There are few working parents who could hold a job down without having contact with schools, a nanny, a babysitter etc. during the day. He was fired for defending his side of an issue against those people who make it a habit to call their public opponents “haters”. Gay marriage supporters are some the most vicious and intolerant people to have to deal with and I’m beginning to think that that I don’t want them working where I do business or living near my children, who are proudly Christian and will bear the brunt of these campaigns to punish those who express their beliefs.
Mike actually I think the Yes on 1 side were the hateful ones…. and pretty much a bunch of bigoted lairs… history has shown that if children need protecting from anyone it would be from Yes on 1 primary financiers, the Roman Catholic Church and their bishops …. that notwithstanding… I think this is America and everyone has a right to express their stupidity and Larry Grard should still have his job… what happened to Grard is what you ‘good Christians’ have been doing to gay folks for time in memorial… and I think we as a community need to be better then that.
Mike Jackson-
The Email was not sent to him as a citizen, unless you have some kind of prescient knowledge regarding this issue. In point of fact, Mr. Grard responded in an unprofessional manner to a press release. He was not fired because he was a Christian, and the HRC did not demand that he be fired. He was fired for being unprofessional in his duties as a reporter.
I will be blunt, as a whole, the LGBT Community puts up with a lot with regards to being denigrated. We are called ‘perverts’, ‘pedophiles’, ‘monsters’, and a whole lot worse every day. Members of our Community are regularly raped, murdered, assaulted, and have their property vandalized for the “crime” of being gay, lesbian or transgender. The same does NOT happen to Mormons and Catholics yet. It will happen, especially when men like Grard blame being Christian for the loss of their job.
Now, I did not write up something that demonized Mr. Grard, but you feel as if it is your “duty” to come in here and attack us for reporting on what happened. I do feel that there is more here than shows, but I have a very strong feeling that Grard was fired for a lot more than just this incident.
Of course the sex abuse scandal exists in all other communities. The Orthodox Jewish community in New York was recently outed as having protected their child molesters for the same reason that the Catholic Church did, to protect their reputation. But no sense of outrage from the media or gay community. I also think that it is a bit hypocritical for gay activists to attack the Catholic Church when almost all of the sex abuse was committed by gay men. Something like 4% were committed by heterosexual men, a lesson for the church in how toleration can backfire.
Mike… the Church has been outed not just in New York…. but almost everyplace it is in operation… and the most resent investigations from Ireland are showing that while about 3% of the priests were the offenders… 100% of the bishops covered up for them, ‘tolerated’ their predations and allowed them to continue for no other reason then they were worried about the Churches image.
“what happened to Grard is what you ‘good Christians’ have been doing to gay folks for time in memorial…”
What happened to this “good Christian” is that he was raped when he was eleven years old by a 23 year old gay activist. I share that with you so you can have something else to mock me for, other than being a Christian.
well Mike this ‘gay activist’ was raped by a ‘good catholic priest’ in a school for the deaf when I was 10 because he found deaf children and in particular deaf little girls, were pretty easy pickings… then I was forced to live through a hellish inquisition as the church was afraid it would have to pay out some money because it failed to protect me from this man …. I have seen and lived the evil the Church does first hand…. so we all have our stories to tell don’t we?
My deepest sympathy to you. I wish you were able to express sympathy for other victims. I think you would have if I wasn’t Christian.
Mike as a molestation victim myself… you know I understand what you when through… So stop with the Christian martyr shit already.
I think the gay community has simply taken upon themselves the right to be intolerant, to hate, and to discriminate against anyone, including other gays (look at the outing campaigns) because they were discriminated against by all communities and all cultures for centuries. But it is still hate. It is still discrimination. It is still intolerance. I could easily rationalize an excuse for very un-Christian behavior if I wished to blame an entire community for the actions of one. But I know that is wrong. The gay community seems to have a high tolerance for doing what it reviles the rest of the world for inflicting on them.
Mike what you are seeing is gays pushing back, albeit in a sometime not so tolerant fashion…. but by your own admission the original offense did not come from us…. are you surprised that a group of people who have been discriminated against and have their rights denied on a regular basis would not eventually not have this reaction?
If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. Revenge. If a Christian wrong… me, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute…
“So stop with the Christian martyr shit already” Excuse me, Paula, but you have already expressed your intolerance of Christians pretty clearly. And now I’m a “Christian martyr shit” for assuming that your lack of expressed sympathy for my experience is part of that intolerance??
Mike you did not get molested because you are a Christian… I did not get molested because I was gay… we got molested because we were children.
But I have every sympathy for your experience and have not tried to minimize what happened to you in any way… however, If you have been through the same victim counseling as I have… then you know you being a Christian or me being gay really had nothing to do with our molestations.
However, you shared your experience as a way to justify your position on gays…. and you quoted numbers that were patently false(since the figures show most child abusers are indeed heterosexual men), just as the Yes on 1 people in Maine did, to justify to my readers the reason gays should not have any rights… Shame on you.
Regarding the pushing back rationalization, if it works for you then it works for everyone, including your current target/victims, which have grown to include almost every community that exists since intolerance for gays was a universal event.
I can suggest an easy way to fix that…. since it is Christians who are the original sinners in this situation… As a Christian go out and tell your fellow Christians to stop treating gays as second class citizens and denying them their rights… and I can promise the gays won’t push back anymore.
Problem solved…
Always remember whatsoever you do unto others it shall return to you tenfold and if you withhold from others, God will withhold from you…. Whatsoever you sow you shall reap… and in saying that… this is why I think as a community lgbts should get behind Mr. Grard and get his job back.
” However, you shared your experience as a way to justify your position on gays” So, pushing back includes misrepresenting what people say and shamefully at that?. I clearly referenced your “good christian”
remark with “gay activist” in relating my experience so that you could see the ignorance and intolerance of using sarcastic
generalizations in attacking those you disagree with. I have been raised, and have raised my children, to be forgiving and tolerant and to not
fall into the trap of using the transgressions of others as an excuse for hating and bigotry. The gay community seems to relish becoming twisted and hateful.
“and you quoted numbers that were patently false” That is nonsense. The vast majority, in the 90 percentile, of the church victims were boys, not girls. Match that with demographics nd you have an inescapable conclusion about the frequency of sex abusers among gays. The minority committing the majority of the abuse.
well Mike my experience with “good Christians” has been that many are a pretty untruthful, unforgiving and intolerant bunch when it comes to gays… so I can only go with what I know…. and what my first hand experience has taught me… whose fault is it that I have that first hand experience that tells me that Mike?
I am not the one advocating that Christian be treated unequally because they choose to be Christians.
Now you come in here trying to scapegoat gays and still trying to present distorted facts… but you know as well as I do…. (or you should anyway)… that it is not about the gender of the victims to these types… it is the fact that they are children that turns them on.
A study just released by the John Jay institute, that the RCC commissioned and paid 2 million dollars for, said quite the opposite of what you are trying to put forth here… it said that gay clergy are no more likely to molest children then straight clergy.
The reason most of the victims in the Church sex scandal were boys is because the Catholic Church has some pretty misogynistic policies and attitudes towards woman that keep most little girls from, (fortunately), being readily available to the predators. As you pointed out earlier in this thread… This problem also exists in other denominations as well… but in those instances of abuse , it was girls who were the primary victims.
While 80 percent of the Churches abuse scandal were males, that leaves 20 percent who were girls, so history shows that when the Catholic predators had a chance to get to little girls… they also went for it… The Irish sex abuse report tells a heart breaking story of a little girl who was molested by a priest who penetrated her both vaginally and rectally… with his crucifix… the report also went on to say the local Bishop still covered up for this man.
And I am not even going to get into the details of what happened to me…. but suffice to say it was pretty disgusting, traumatic and that the man who molested me also abused several boys as well.
It would appear to me… you need to better to educate yourself on the true nature of the problem of child sexual abuse before you come here to debate an issue you seem to have little grasp of the facts on… and you do it before you try to blame that problem on gays any further…. or use it to justify why you think gays should be treated unequally.
Mr. Jackson,
You fell into it right there. You generalized and called me bigoted, twisted and hateful, yet I am often the most neutral of writers in the LGBT sphere. I rarely go on the attack, and usually do so when I have been personally insulted. I have had many a decent conversation with people of the opposite view point. I make it a point not to attack the person directly, but their logic and their points. Still, you have just labeled me a twisted, bigoted, hateful person.
I am sorry, but unless you have stop with your own generalizations, Mr. Jackson, you are not convincing me of anything. In fact, all you are doing is showing just how bigoted your views are.
Often times, what is bigoted hate speech to one group is the “truth” to another. Antisemites honestly believe that they are telling the truth and not being hateful. Racists honestly believe the stereotypes and hate speech they use constantly is not hateful, but rather the truth. You do not believe that you are being bigoted because you believe what you are saying is the reality no matter how much it runs contrary to the real world.
I have listened to twenty years of Christians whine about being denied the right to turn this country into a theocracy and claim that they are being discriminated against. I have been the victim of religious harassment on the job. I have had to sit and listen to people defame my very life in the name of religion, and the fact that I am not some twisted, hateful, and bigoted individual who resorts to stereotypes about Christian Bible Thumpers or call them all sorts of vile names is rather amazing. I do my best to be respectful. If the other side were to do the same for me and my kind, maybe we could have a discussion instead of an argument. Heck, it isn’t even an argument, it is the automatic gainsaying of what ever the other side says and intense verbal abuse. Complaining that the LGBT Community is hateful and bigoted is not any more accurate than one of us attacking all people of faith. There are good and supportive people of a variety of faiths, and even those who disagree with us but are respectful. Unfortunately, a few bad people spoil the debate.
As for Mr. Grard, I did not attack him, nor did I defame him in this article. I see that there is a lot of information missing, and that this is likely not the full story. Should it be proven that Mr. Grard was fired for a single transgression and lapse in judgment, then this blog will stand beside him in demanding his job be reinstated or other compensation be made for his termination. Should, however, it be proven otherwise and that there were other circumstances involved, then we will stand behind his termination. Until all- and I do mean all- of the facts are in from all sides, then nothing can be determined or stated with any accuracy.