“GOD IS GENDER F*CKING QUEER!” shouts Rabbi Debra Kolodny, as she takes her turn with the megaphone at a protest against a Freedom Foundation’s fundraiser dinner, which featured Steve Forbes, in Portland, Oregon.
Freedom Foundation is a Washington state based think tank, which has opened branches in Oregon and California in the last year. They are known for supporting Right To Work. According to their webpage, “The Freedom Foundation is working to reverse the stranglehold public-sector unions have on our government. There is no path to expanded freedom, opportunity or prosperity until we make collective bargaining transparent, give government employees a choice to join an employee’s union or not, and prohibit taxpayer’s money from being unwillingly used to influence the political system. Freedom Foundation has the will and skill to take on those who attack our freedom.”
So of course the unions turn out to protest them. About 50 protesters in all, from SEIU, AFL-CIO, IATSE, and AFSCME, along with wacked out advocacy group Jobs With Justice.
Rabbi Kolodny was just one of the handful of special guest speakers at the protest. She goes on a rant about what gender God is, and concludes “GOD IS GENDER F*CKING QUEER!”.
She also blamed the Orlando shooting on the Freedom Foundation, by proclaiming “It’s not just that these folks fund conversion therapy, and that the poor souls who are subjected to that are traumatized and have their souls denied and desacrelized (?)! The fact that conversion therapy exists in this country and is advocated for translates into massacres like what occurred in Orlando at The Pulse LGBTQI nightclub. We now know that the gentleman who pulled the trigger frequented that nightclub, had relationships with men, and his internalized homophobia, his self loathing, propagated by this kind of hate, resulted in a 50 person massacre. I say The Freedom Foundation has BLOOD ON ITS HANDS!”
One of their repeated chants through the evening was “Hey! Wake up and hearing the warning. STOP DENYING GLOBAL WARMING!” Yet the organizers of the protest themselves need to heed their own words, as they used a generator that spewed all sorts of smoke and fumes in order to inflate a giant “fat cat” balloon character.
But back to Rabbi Kolodny. She stressed the importance of “love thy neighbor”, as it is mentioned more times in the scripture than any other commandment. During diatribe about loving neighbors, a small cadre of Freedom Foundation supporters walked by, and the crowd spontaneously broke out in a chant of “SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!”. Only at a wackjob protest does “love thy neighbor” morph into shaming thy neighbor within a matter of seconds.
Part way through the protest, Oregon AFL-CIO president Tom Chamberlain decided that protesting was too much work, and slithered away, leaving the protesting to the common folk underlings.
And one last time going back to Rabbi Debra Kolodny. “What makes me angry is when people in organizations usurp that word, “freedom”, when what they are about is oppression and hate and spiritual violence” she shouted. “The Freedom Foundation is anything but. The Freedom Foundation is about oppression. It’s about hate. It’s about spiritual violence, and, ultimately, it’s about DEATH”
Freedom Foundation’s Oregon director, Anne Marie Gurney, says “Our event meets all metrics for success. The room was packed with supporters and activists for freedom. Another metric of our success is when our opponents respond. Having about five unions and progressive groups represented in the protest group outside shows we are successful in our mission, and we are emboldened.” When asked about funding conversion therapy, she says “We have never funded conversion therapy, to be clear. That is nowhere on our radar. Our laser focus is labor reform. Period.”
It turns out that it’s the Murdoch Charitable Trust that has funded it, and they have also donated to Freedom Foundation, so, according to wackjob logic, that means that the Freedom Foundation has funded it.
