Regarding homophobia in general, the good news is that there is a lot less of it than there used to be. The bad news is that it ever existed in the first place, and the worse news is that it remains far stronger than is healthy for a society dedicated in theory to equality under the law.
BARNEY FRANKGoing before an audience of people who expect you to be funny is tough. Going before an audience that expect you to be boring, and then being a little funny, is much easier. I prefer easier.
More Barney Frank Quotes
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Excessive partisanship is the problem. There has never been a democracy in the history of the world in a polity of any size where you didn’t have political parties. Even sometimes over the objections of the people who started it.
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They appear to have become so attached to their outrage that they are even more outraged that they won’t be able to be outraged anymore.
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For the trustees to turn away from the entirely reasonable request of the students that a hearing-impaired individual be made president of the college is a very unfortunate expression of insensitivity.
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There is a correlation between people who attack same-sex marriage and have difficulty maintaining their own.
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I think there was an absolute, deep gap between consensual relations between adults, which people may like or dislike, and people who physically impose themselves on children or misuse their authority to impose on children.
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Capitalism works better from every perspective when the economic decision makers are forced to share power with those who will be affected by those decisions.
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I should have voted for the first Iraq war. George Bush did that one very well. I had been skeptical. I was afraid that George Bush was going to treat the first Iraq war the way his son treated the second.
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And unless you think there is a serious chance you’re going to jail, don’t listen to your lawyer.
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Let us not say that we will decide on a political basis at the national level that no State is competent to regulate the practice of medicine in that State if they decide to allow a doctor to prescribe marijuana, because that is what we are talking about.
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Conservatives believe that from the standpoint of the federal government, life begins at conception and ends at birth.
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Take free speech: most of the tough cases on free speech involve very unpleasant people saying very obnoxious things.
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Moderate Republicans are reverse Houdinis. They tie themselves up in knots and then tell you they can’t do anything because they’re tied up in knots.
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While I was pleasantly surprised by the relatively high number of jobs created in April, the fact is that job creation during this recovery period has significantly lagged both historical experience in recovery, and the projections of the Bush Administration.
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These two entities—Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—are not facing any kind of financial crisis.
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I have this fear that one day there’s going to be a fire in the Senate and there are only going to be 57 senators there and they’ll all die because they won’t have 60 votes to allow themselves to leave the building.
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I don’t think Donald Trump is the right person because I very much disagree with him.
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Donald Trump has done more for getting people to understand the importance of public policy that respond to public needs in an affirmative way than anything we could have done on our own.
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We don’t get ourselves dry cleaned.
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I do not think that any self-respecting radical in history would have considered advocating people’s rights to get married, join the Army, and earn a living as a terribly inspiring revolutionary platform.
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The rights of the people who have done terrible things are hard to defend. You have to keep pointing out, the question is the process to determine whether they’ve done the terrible things.
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When community action was put into federal law in the early sixties as part of the effort to combat poverty and social injustice, I supported it intellectually.
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There were a lot of Romneys. There’s the Romney who was going to be better on gay rights than Ted Kennedy; now there’s a Romney who checks with Rick Santorum on that issue.
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There is an irony that the most active anti-gay groups are Al-Qaeda and the American Right wing.
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For many of those who had historically supported welfare programs in the broadest sense, it was perfectly reasonable to enact legislation in which poor people were the objects of efforts to assist them.
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People are entitled to the presumption of innocence.
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The public is ready now for a safety net for the middle class, something not just for the poor, but for everyone who will need help, from time to time, in order to own a home, educate their kids, keep themselves healthy or have something to retire on.
BARNEY FRANK