Did Your Congressman Just Vote To Kick 4 Million Americans Off Food Stamps? (Full List) | The New Civil Rights Movement
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Did Your Congressman Just Vote To Kick 4 Million Americans Off Food Stamps? (Full List)
Here’s What’s Really Weird About Mitt Romney Using Navy Seal Who Died | The New Civil Rights Movement
►http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/heres-whats-really-weird-about-mitt-romney-using-navy-seal-who-died/politics/2012/10/10/50889
Here’s What’s Really Weird About Mitt Romney Using Navy SEAL Who Died
by David Badash on October 10, 2012
in News,Politics
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Mitt Romney has been touting his “relationship” with Glen Doherty, a Navy SEAL who was one of the Team Six members who killed Osama bin Laden, and later was killed in last month’s tragic September 11 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that also claimed the life of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and one other State Department official.
“I met some remarkable people, one of whom was a former Navy SEAL,” Mitt Romney has been telling supporters as part of his new stump speech focusing on foreign policy. “I just learned a few days ago that he was one of the two former navy seals killed in Benghazi. It broke my heart.”
“Now, according to Boston TV station WHDH News, Doherty’s mother is none too happy with Romney,” the UPI just reported:
“I don’t trust Romney,” Barbara Doherty, Glen’s mother, told WHDH. “He shouldn’t make my son’s death part of his political agenda. It’s wrong to use these brave young men, who wanted freedom for all, to degrade Obama.” A friend of Doherty’s, Elf Ellefsen, recalled hearing Doherty’s account of the chance meeting with Romney, and describes it as “comical” and “pathetic.”
According to MyNorthwest.com, Ellefsen and Doherty had been friends for more than 20 years, and last saw Doherty a week before what would be his last mission to Libya. “”He said it was very comical,” Ellefsen said.
“Mitt Romney approached him ultimately four times, using this private gathering as a political venture to further his image. He kept introducing himself as Mitt Romney, a political figure. The same introduction, the same opening line. Glen believed it to be very insincere and stale.”
“He said it was pathetic and comical to have the same person come up to you within only a half hour, have this person reintroduce himself to you, having absolutely no idea whatsoever that he just did this 20 minutes ago, and did not even recognize Glen’s face.”
[Bolding added]
Did you catch that? Mitt Romney approached Glen Doherty four times, each time “introducing himself as Mitt Romney, a political figure.”
Weird, right?
First of all, “Hi, I’m Mitt Romney” would have been sufficient. “Hi, I’m Mitt Romney, and you may have heard, I’m running for president” would have been ok too.
But even weirder?
“He said it was pathetic and comical to have the same person come up to you within only a half hour, have this person reintroduce himself to you, having absolutely no idea whatsoever that he just did this 20 minutes ago, and did not even recognize Glen’s face.”
What may be even weirder, this doesn’t sound unlike Mitt Romney, does it?
But what it also sounds like is someone who has poor — very poor — short-term memory. As in, someone who’s suffered traumatic brain injury and just doesn’t remember what they said not thirty minutes ago.
Which would totally explain why Mitt Romney continually makes statements that his campaign is forced to take back, clarify, state that “the Governor didn’t mean that,” right?
On June 16, 1968, Mitt Romney, while a Mormon Missionary in Paris, France, was driving a car and was involved in an auto accident that resulted in one death. By all reports, Romney was seriously injured. Via The New York Times:
“Mitt was just coming out of his coma, but his face was all swollen, his eye was almost shut, and one arm was fractured,” Robinson said. “We didn’t have CT scans or MRIs in those days, but we got what tests we could to show that he was OK, and that he was certainly going to survive, although he probably came within a hair of not surviving.” But Robinson said Romney recovered quickly without surgery, benefiting in part from his youth and general good health.
There’s no shame in suffering a brain injury. There is shame in keeping it hidden if it could affect your ability to serve as the Commander In Chief.
Wouldn’t brain damage caused by an auto accident explain so much? And don’t voters at last have the right to ask the question?
Related:
Romney’s recall Romney: I paid ‘substantial’ taxes ‘so far as I can recall’
“I don’t recall even coming back once to go to a Bain or management meeting. We were, I was out there running the Olympics and it was a full time job, I can tell you that.”
Mitt Romney Can’t Recall Bullying Gay Classmate
Regnerus Scandal: Researcher Lying, Not Independent From Anti-Gay Funders | The New Civil Rights Movement
►http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/regnerus-scandal-researcher-lying-not-independent-from-anti-gay-funders/news/2012/10/07/50176
Regnerus Scandal: Researcher Lying, Not Independent From Anti-Gay Funders
by Scott Rose on October 7, 2012
in Analysis,Bigotry Watch,News,Scott Rose
WHAT THIS INVOLVES
A study booby-trapped against gay parents.
The booby-trapped study is serving as a basis for National Organization for Marriage anti-gay attack ads all over the country.
The hoax study was perpetrated by Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas at Austin (UT).
The most outrageously defamatory of its false findings is that children of gay parents experience dramatically high levels of sex abuse.
Regnerus’s chief funding agency is the NOM-linked Witherspoon Institute.
NOM officials have a long history of conflating homosexuals with pedophiles, a known falsehood.
Nothing can so potently hate-and-fear-monger voters into voting against gay rights, quite like telling them that homosexuals sexually molest children.
REGNERUS DID NOT CONDUCT THE STUDY INDEPENDENTLY OF HIS FUNDERS’ ANTI-GAY POLITICAL GOALS FOR IT
The study design began in 2010.
IRS documents show that Regnerus’s study specifically is a project of Witherspoon’s Program for Family, Marriage and Democracy.
In 2010, when the Regnerus study was in its design phase, W. Bradford Wilcox was director of that Witherspoon program.
Wilcox, who is against contraception, sees social research as a “vindication of Christian moral teaching.”
Wilcox has confessed that in 2010, he was involved in the design of the Regnerus study.
Wilcox’s confession was forced into the open by accumulating evidence of scientific misconduct connected to the study, its publication, and Wilcox himself.
However, Wilcox, Regnerus, and Witherspoon president Luis Tellez — who is a NOM board member — are attempting to deny that Wilcox was acting as a Witherspoon agent when he collaborated with Regnerus on study design in 2010.
Even in his confession, Wilcox attempts to deny that he ever engaged with Regnerus about the study in any official Witherspoon capacity.
Wilcox alleges that his title of “Director of the Program for Family, Marriage and Democracy” was an “honorific.”
SOCIOLOGISTS SAY THAT WILCOX IS LYING
Philip Cohen, Ph.D. is Director of Graduate Studies in Sociology at the University of Maryland’s Population Research Center. In a comment under Wilcox’s confession, Cohen said:
“I find this description not credible. I do not think any reasonable auditor or ethical agency would subscribe to the idea that the “director” of an organization was not and [sic] “officer” of it.”
Dr. Andrew J. Perrin is a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He also considers that Wilcox is not being truthful:
“Brad Wilcox’s affiliation with Witherspoon is all over the place, attached to his name in numerous websites, flyers, talk titles, etc., and so it was certainly incumbent upon both Regnerus and Wilcox to recognize the conflict of interest, and it would not have required any significant investigation to note that conflict. If, in fact, Wilcox was one of the peer reviewers of the article, as has been the subject of conjecture, that’s obviously a further conflict.” Dr. Perrin continues: “the idea that this web of associations doesn’t constitute a serious conflict of interest in the publication of the article just doesn’t pass the smell test. The most reasonable explanation, given what we know, is that Wilcox, Regnerus, and others in their circle colluded to make an end run around serious academic review in order to get seriously flawed information into the public eye.” (Bolding added).
Witherspoon, meanwhile, has been desperately attempting to scrub its sites of all evidence of Wilcox’s associations with the Witherspoon Institute.
Wilcox, however, as noted by the sociologist Dr. Perrin, constantly used his Witherspoon Institute affiliation as a resume booster. To see abundant evidence of Wilcox’s affiliations with the Witherspoon Institute, go here.
FRESH DOCUMENTATION SHOWS THAT WILCOX IS LYING
Fresh evidence demonstrates conclusively that Wilcox was indeed working as a Witherspoon official when he collaborated with Regnerus on study design.
Here is that evidence:
At the University of Virginia, Wilcox is Director of the National Marriage Project. Regnerus’s published study says that a “leading family researcher” from the University of Virginia was on Regnerus’s study design team.
This reporter sent an Open Records Act request to Regnerus’s University of Texas, asking for one very specific sort of documentation only. I asked only for Regnerus study consulting contracts that were 1) for study design; and 2) made for anybody from the University of Virginia.
On October 4, 2012, I received a letter from UT. The letter states that the university has no documents responsive to my request. What that means, is that when Witherspoon program director Brad Wilcox collaborated with Regnerus on study design, he did so as a Witherspoon agent — as a Witherspoon Program Director — not as an independent contractor through Regnerus’s university.
WHY THIS MATTERS SO MUCH
Regnerus and his funders booby-trapped the study against gays for political reasons.
Regnerus and his funders are actively and deliberately seeking to mislead the public into believing that Regnerus conducted his study independently of his funders’ anti-gay-rights political goals for the study.
Witherspoon tells that deliberate lie in Question 13 of the stand-alone site it created to promote the Regnerus study.
Regnerus tells that lie right in his published study. Regnerus has written “No funding agency representatives were consulted about research design, survey contents, analyses or conclusions.”
Yet, very, very obviously, when Wilcox was Witherspoon’s Director of the Program on Family, Marriage and Democracy, he was a Regnerus study “funding agency representative.”
Regnerus clearly is lying.
WITHERSPOON, REGNERUS, AND THE STUDY “PLANNING GRANT”
Witherspoon did not just arrange for Regnerus to have his full $785,000 in study funding, and then tell him to do whatever he wanted with it.
Rather, as per Regnerus’s C.V. downloadable from his author’s website, Witherspoon gave Regnerus a $55,000 planning grant before giving him his full study funding.
That means that Witherspoon had to approve Regnerus’s study plan, before it would give him his full study funding.
In the period of the Witherspoon planning grant, Regnerus collaborated with Witherspoon’s Wilcox on study design.
REGNERUS, WILCOX, AND CHILD SEX ABUSE
Regnerus says that his study answers this question:
“Do the children of gay and lesbian parents look comparable to those of their heterosexual counterparts?”
Regnerus’s study methodology, though, did not truly allow for studying children of gay and lesbian parents.
The majority of Regnerus’s study subjects — as per his own admission in his study — were products of opposite-sex couples who later separated, with one parent going on to have a same-sex relationship.
In asking about childhood sex abuse, Regnerus asked his young adult respondents if “a parent or other adult caregiver” ever sexually victimized them.
The result thus is un-interpretable. The respondent’s heterosexual parent, or a babysitter, or a priest could have committed the alleged sexual victimization.
Yet, in their anti-gay attack ads based on the Regnerus study, NOM attributes the alleged child sex abuse exclusively to gay parents. Regnerus himself has done that on national television.
Regnerus alleges that 23% of his study’s children of “lesbian mothers” were sexually victimized as children.
Past studies of lesbian mothers have consistently found low rates of child sex abuse. The second highest rate for child sex abuse in Regnerus’s study is step-families, at 12% just over half that for lesbian mothers.
Regnerus’s “finding” has no credibility. Other of Regnerus’s reported results are just plainly absurd. In any event, it is impossible to say who committed the alleged sex abuse, and therefore, connecting it to lesbian mothers in any way is defamatory.
To connect a mother to sex abuse of her child, in the public mind, with no knowledge of whether the mother ever abused her child, is as despicable as blaming a rape victim for getting raped.
The numbers seen in Regnerus’s published study are not the same as those in the data files given to him by Knowledge Networks, the company that administered his study’s surveys.
Rather, Regnerus applied weights and controls and used other tools to adjust the number.
To know the correct weights and controls to use, a sociologist must be certain of the percent which the minority he is studying constitutes within the general population.
Regnerus only vaguely described “lesbian mother” or “gay father.” If his respondents said that a parent had ever had “a same-sex romantic relationship,” Regnerus counted them as having either a “lesbian mother” or a “gay father.”
However, there is simply no way to know what percent of the general population has a parent who has ever had “a same-sex romantic relationship.”
That is what one would need to know, in order to be able to apply a correct “weight” or “control” to Regnerus’s raw data.
It is absolutely true, that neither Regnerus nor anybody else knows the correct weights to use for Regnerus’s very vaguely defined, so-called “lesbian mothers” and/or “gay fathers.”
In sum that means; 1) that in applying weights and controls and other strategies to his raw data; 2) Regnerus and Wilcox were free to play around with theoretical population percents representing children of; 3) a parent who has ever had a “same-sex romantic relationship,” 4) moving the study’s “finding” number up or down, according to the result that Regnerus and Wilcox most wanted to be able to report to the public.
I directly asked Regnerus to explain to me how he derived his reported finding — that “23% of lesbian mothers’ children are sexually victimized” — from his raw data.
Regnerus refused to answer.
A sociologist who had behaved honestly with his study’s numbers should have no hesitations about explaining how he derived his reported numbers from his data.
DOES REGNERUS’S REFUSAL TO ANSWER THE QUESTION IMPLY GUILT?
Regnerus very willingly gives lengthy, rambling interviews to right wing religious publications, but refuses to respond to simple, direct, science-based inquiries about his study.
Subsequently, I made an Open Records Act request to UT, asking for all of the Regnerus study’s data analyses communications between Regnerus and Wilcox.
In reaction to that request, UT sent the Texas Attorney General a letter, asking for exemptions to my document request.
The UT letter told the Texas Attorney General that Wilcox was involved with both data collection and data analyses on the Regnerus study.
So, Wilcox was involved in collaborating with Regnerus during many stages of the study, including 1) when the vague way of defining gay parents was settled on; 2) when the vague question about child sex abuse was formulated; 3) when the data was collected, and 4) when the data was analyzed.
It can almost seem funny, that Regnerus claims to have “found” that out of every 2,988 Americans aged 18 to 39, six-hundred and twenty have never once in their lives masturbated.
As obviously untrue as that is, though, Regnerus and his NOM-linked funders and NOM itself are using his equally ridiculous, maliciously invented sex abuse “findings” to demonize gay people and to hate-and-fear-monger voters into voting against gay rights.
REGNERUS IS NOT EVEN MAKING A PRETENSE OF INDEPENDENCE FROM HIS FUNDERS
On November 3, 2012, Regnerus and Witherspoon’s Ana Samuel — a hateful anti-gay bigot — will be appearing together to discuss the study at an event sponsored by a Witherspoon/NOM affiliate, the so-called Love and Fidelity Network.
Love and Fidelity has its office space inside Witherspoon’s building on the Princeton campus. NOM/Witherspoon’s Robert P. George, and Witherspoon/NOM’s Luis Tellez, as well as NOM’s Maggie Gallagher are on the “Love and Fidelity” advisory board.
Also appearing to discuss the study with Regnerus and his funding agency representative Ana Samuel will be Robert Oscar Lopez, who appears to fit into the documented NOM strategy for getting children of gay parents to denounce their own parents to the public.
Regnerus recruited Lopez off the internet, and Lopez’s gay-bashing essay subsequently was published on Witherspoon’s “Public Discourse.”
At the time Lopez’s essay appeared in “Public Discourse,” Brad Wilcox was listed on the roster of the “Public Discourse” editorial board.
After I reported that fact, Witherspoon scrubbed Wilcox’s name off its editorial board roster. Witherspoon previously has been caught scrubbing incriminating, Regnerus-related evidence from its websites.
CONCLUSION
Regnerus, the Witherspoon Institute, and Brad Wilcox all are very deliberately lying to the public,in hopes of misleading the public into believing that Regnerus conducted his study independently of his funders’ anti-gay-rights political goals for it.
Regnerus did not conduct his study independently of his funders’ anti-gay-rights political goals for it.
Regnerus very actively continues to promote his study with his anti-gay-rights funding agency representatives, while refusing to take any science-based questions about his study from the non-anti-gay-bigot media.
New York City-based novelist and freelance writer Scott Rose’s LGBT-interest by-line has appeared on Advocate.com, PoliticusUSA.com, The New York Blade, Queerty.com, Girlfriends and in numerous additional venues. Among his other interests are the arts, boating and yachting, wine and food, travel, poker and dogs. His “Mr. David Cooper’s Happy Suicide” is about a New York City advertising executive assigned to a condom account.
Top Mormon Leader: Children Of Same-Sex Couples Are ‘Victimized’ | The New Civil Rights Movement
►http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/top-mormon-leader-children-of-same-sex-couples-are-victimized/politics/2012/10/07/50561
Top Mormon Leader: Children Of Same-Sex Couples Are ‘Victimized’
by David Badash on October 7, 2012
in News,Politics,Religion
Post image for Top Mormon Leader: Children Of Same-Sex Couples Are ‘Victimized’
One of the top leaders within the Mormon Church, Dallin Harris Oaks, said Saturday that children who are raised by same-sex couples are “victimized.” Oaks, the fifth most senior apostle in the LDS Church, was speaking at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints’ General Conference, and also spoke at length against single-parenting.
“He urged parents and caregivers to respond to children who struggle, including with same-sex attraction, with ‘loving understanding, not bullying or ostracism’,” the Salt Lake Tribune reports:
He also cautioned that it should be assumed that kids raised by same-sex couples or unwed mothers will be at a disadvantage.
“Children are also victimized by marriages that do not occur,” Oaks said.
Discussing children who are LGBTQ, Oaks suggested they suffer from “psychological abuse.”
“When we consider the dangers from which children should be protected, we should also include psychological abuse,” Oaks said, rightly attacking those who bully, and then added:
“Young people struggling with any exceptional condition, including same-gender attraction, are particularly vulnerable and need loving understanding and not bullying or ostracism.”
“We should assume the same disadvantages for children raised by couples of the same gender,” as for children raised by unmarried opposite-sex couples, and single parents.” Oaks then quoted an unnamed New York Times writer who claimed that “same-sex marriage is a social experiment.”
A quick search finds that writer to be the Times‘ own conservative op-ed columnist, Ross Douthat, who wrote in June of the flawed Regnerus anti-gay parenting “study” that New Civil Rights Movement writer Scott Rose has thoroughly discredited:
Same-sex marriage is a social experiment, and like most experiments it will take time to understand its consequences. We don’t know how relationship norms and expectations will evolve in the gay community – where the ongoing Dan Savage-style debates about monogamy and fidelity will lead, for instance, or how closely same-sex marriage will be associated with childrearing. We don’t know how plausible Saletan’s vision of wedlock and parenting running on parallel tracks for gays and straights really is.
The Mormon Church, via its wholly-owned Salt Lake City-based newspaper business, the Deseret News, was the first to announce and publicly applaud the flawed Regnerus “study,” and NOM co-founder Robert P. George is on the editorial advisory board of the Deseret News. The New Civil Rights Movement was the first to make this connection and one of the first to report on the “study.”
“One of the most serious abuses of children is to deny them birth,” Oaks claimed, decrying abortion, then praised “a mother in the Philippines [who] said, ‘sometimes we do not have enough money for food, but that is alright, because it gives me the opportunity to teach my children about faith. We gather and pray for relief and the children see the Lord bless us’.”
Oaks, an attorney, served as president of Brigham Young University from 1971–1980, and for decades was considered “a top prospect for appointment to the United States Supreme Court.”
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was a primary supporter of California’s Prop 8, which banned same-sex marriage, and provided extraordinary funding and non-financial, asset support. It is widely believed that the Mormon Church is the main funder of NOM, the National Organization For Marriage.
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Good Morning America’s Sam Champion Comes Out At Thomas Roberts’ Wedding | The New Civil Rights Movement
►http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/good-morning-americas-sam-champion-comes-out-at-thomas-roberts-wedding/media/2012/10/05/50393
Good Morning America’s Sam Champion Comes Out At Thomas Roberts’ Wedding
by David Badash on October 5, 2012
in Media,News
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Sam Champion, co-anchor of ABC’s “Good Morning America,” announced at MSNBC anchor Thomas Roberts’ wedding that he and his fiancé, Rubem Robierb, are getting married New Years Eve. Champion, who is 51 and a Kentucky native, has worked for ABC, first at a local New York City station, since 1988.
“Mr. Champion is the first co-host of a network morning television show to publicly identify as gay. He is expected to talk about his upcoming wedding on Monday’s ‘GMA’,” the New York Times reported:
Mr. Champion’s sexual orientation was no secret to the staff of “GMA,” nor to his colleagues and competitors in the media industry. He exuberantly showed off his engagement ring to colleagues the day after becoming engaged and brought Mr. Robierb to parties with fellow co-hosts. But he didn’t speak publicly about it.
That changed last weekend when Mr. Champion and Mr. Robierb attended the wedding of Thomas Roberts, an MSNBC anchor who is also gay. Jacob Bernstein wrote the following in a Sunday Styles section story about the wedding, published online on Friday afternoon:
Among the 170 or so guests at the reception was Sam Champion, the weather anchor at ABC’s “Good Morning America.” He took a turn on the dance floor with his partner, the photographer Rubem Robierb.
“We’re getting married New Year’s Eve in Miami,” Mr. Champion said in the spirit of the moment.
Mr. Robierb corrected him: “We’ll do it here officially, and then have a party in Miami.”
Offering him congratulations and “Good luck with the wedding planning,” Daily Beast writer Andrew Sullivan notes that Champion “comes out in the new low-key, AC360 way in a vows column for another gay couple’s wedding in NYC.”
Orlando Cruz Becomes First Active Pro Boxer To Say I Am ‘A Proud Gay Man’ | The New Civil Rights Movement
►http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/orlando-cruz-becomes-first-active-pro-boxer-to-say-i-am-a-proud-gay-man/politics/2012/10/04/50337
Orlando Cruz Becomes First Active Pro Boxer To Say I Am ‘A Proud Gay Man’
by David Badash on October 4, 2012
in News,Politics,Sports
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Orlando Cruz is the first professional boxer in history to say, I am “a proud gay man,” while still active in the sport. Cruz is 31 and was born in Puerto Rico. “I’ve been fighting for more than 24 years and as I continue my ascendant career, I want to be true to myself” said Cruz, according to Blabbeando. “I want to try to be the best role model I can be for kids who might look into boxing as a sport and a professional career. I have and will always be a proud Puerto Rican. I have always been and always will be a proud gay man.”
Cruz also made the announcement on Twitter, and linked to the article in Blabbeando:
Orlando Cruz @ElFenomenoCruz
As a boxer, I am proud to tell the World that I have always been and always will be a proud Puerto Rican gay man: bit.ly/T1VN7T
4 Oct 12
Reply
Retweet
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Cruz came out, because “I want to be free and not carry this on and on with myself,” according to the L.A. Times who spoke with the boxer by phone. “I want to let the people see who I really am, to be free, to let people understand.”
He said since his announcement that he’s received “unconditional, 100% support,” including text messages and Twitter and Facebook notes of endorsement from his 2000 Olympic teammate and former multi-division world champion Miguel Cotto and Puerto Rican singer Ricky Martin.
“I was physically and mentally prepared for whatever the reaction would be before this, and I can tell you from the response, this will never bother me again,” Cruz said. “I feel comfortable with myself.”
Cruz lost twice within a five-month stretch in 2009 and 2010 to respected fighters Cornelius Lock, who was trained by Roger Mayweather, and current world champion Daniel Ponce De Leon.
He said he hopes his openness breaks down some walls and erases some stereotypes.
“It should show something for itself: that I have courage, I’m a warrior in the ring,” Cruz said. “It should not diminish me. I’ve fought with the best, and I want to be a world champion.”
The Huffington Post adds:
A former Olympian who competed for Puerto Rico at the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, Cruz has been fighting professionally since December 2000. His next fight is scheduled for Oct. 19 in Kissimmee, Fla., but he will reportedly sit down for an exclusive Telemundo interview before that.
A number of publications have noted that while Cruz is not the first gay man to fight professional, his revelation makes him the first to speak openly about it while being active in the sport. As USA Today noted, Emile Griffith, a welterweight and middleweight champion who fought in the ’50s and ’60s, told Sports Illustrated he was bisexual years after his athletic career had ended.
Among those to praise Cruz’s decision was Bleacher Report columnist Michael Walters. “For Cruz to come out while still actively participating in what has to be considered one of, if not the, most macho sports is truly brave,” Walters wrote.
“I wish I could shake Cruz’s hand. This took a lot of guts,” Cyd Zeigler, Jr., founder of OutSports, the definitive site for news related to LGBT athletes, wrote today:
To be honest, I hadn’t heard of Cruz before last night. But his coming out says a lot. While we hear about athletes in other sports like baseball, basketball and soccer being “afraid” to come out, here’s a guy who literally takes punches to the face finding the courage to be who he is. No one should be more afraid of coming out than a professional boxer whose opponents’ goal is to knock him out cold.
Cruz also has a lot to lose (or be prevented from gaining). Endorsement deals are lucrative, and for someone whose income comes from those deals and winning fights, he has more to lose than many other gay pro athletes.
You can congratulate Cruz via Twitter, where his bio now reads, “Boxeador profesional, ex olímpico, Campeón Latino y cuarto en división pluma a nivel mundial de WBO. Soy y siempre seré un orgulloso hombre gay puertorriqueño,” and Facebook.
Image via Facebook