Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL) has a strong pro-homosexual voting record, and voted against a ban on partial-birth abortion, among other anti-life votes.

By Laurie Higgins

With all the recent bad press about Mark Kirk’s prevaricating about his military record and his weaselly responses when confronted by the media about his prevarications, multiple people have made the argument that as bad as he is, it’s better to have a Republican elected than a Democrat. In the past I shared that view.  I have never voted for a third-party candidate or refused to vote—until now.  I have always been firmly committed to voting for the Republican candidate even if I had to hold my nose while voting—until now. Is there a limit to how bad a Republican candidate can get before Republicans will stand on principle? I’m beginning to think that Republicans have a limitless capacity for capitulation.

This is my thinking:

I think that it will be easier for a good Republican candidate to unseat Alexi Giannoulias in six years than it will be for a good Republican to unseat a semi-skillful incumbent like Mark Kirk. If Kirk gets in office, I fear we’ll have him for decades. I don’t think that’s the case with Giannoulias. The loss of the Senate seat to Giannoulias would provide Illinois Republicans six years to find a truly worthy Republican candidate. No matter which position Republicans take, it’s a crapshoot. We’re all speculating. Giannoulias could be an effective senator and, therefore, very difficult to unseat. Or he could be incompetent and, therefore, easy to unseat. With Kirk, we know we’re getting a skillful and experienced legislator who will be difficult to unseat.

Marc Ambinder, political editor of The Atlantic, writes this about the prospect of a Kirk win:

If Kirk wins the seat, he’s instantaneously the biggest name in the GOP.  The seat, you’ll remember, was Barack Obama’s seat. Kirk would be bigger than Massachusetts’ lion killer Scott Brown, bigger than the presidential candidates for a while, and he can be a kingmaker.

He’ll have a huge donor list, he’ll own Obama’s seat, and then he’s faced with a choice. Does he moderate himself truly, work in a bipartisan way and be a leader in the Senate.  Or, does he go with immediate ego gratification and position himself to be on the vice presidential short list for 2012? If Kirk doesn’t want to run again in 2016, he can bank on the fact that he’ll either be on the veep short-list then, or he’ll be a bona fide presidential contender in his own right.(http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/05/mark-kirk-the-next-scott-brown/56598/)

There is too much at stake to risk letting Kirk get into the Senate. I’m willing to pay a relatively small price now by letting Giannoulias get elected rather than pay a huge price in a few years by letting Kirk get his nose in the Senate tent.

In addition to Kirk’s wholly indefensible embellishment of his military record, there is the significant matter of his sexual predilections, about which, thanks to homosexual activist, blogger, and “outer” extraordinaire Mike Rogers, there is less doubt. Behind the scenes, many people on both sides of the political aisle have long claimed that Kirk is homosexual, but it took Rogers to give wider exposure and greater credibility to those rumors.

Rogers, who “outed” Kirk last week, has the dubious honor of being reliable when it comes to “outing” politicians. For those unfamiliar with Rogers, click here to see him when he appeared on the View a year ago to promote the “outing” documentary Outrage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsOJwVmFozs&feature=player_embedded .

Why did he “out” Kirk now? Rogers “outed” him now because Kirk did not vote with the “gay” lobby on the recent vote to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” As long as Kirk toed the “gay” line—which he has consistently done—his secret was safe with political lefties. A thrill goes up the legs of homosexualists whenever the “Republican” Kirk endorses yet one more assault on sexual norms and families. They will tolerate many things, including both open and secret sexual deviance, as long as they get the votes they need. According to that paradigm of virtue, Mike Rogers, there is one thing they will not, however, tolerate, and that is “hypocrisy.”

Here’s yet more skin-crawling information on Kirk’s voting record:

Kirk voted against the ban on the barbaric procedure euphemistically called “partial birth” abortion; he voted against restricting interstate transport of minors to get abortions; he voted against making it a crime to harm a fetus during the commission of another a crime; but he voted in favor of embryonic stem cell research.

For those Republicans who foolishly dismiss the “social” issues and character, there’s always Kirks infamous defense and fiscal votes. Kirk stunned his constituents by first voting against the troop surge in Iraq and then voting for cap and trade, which Indiana Republican Congressman Mike Pence describes as “the largest tax increase in American history under the guise of climate change.”

Some Illinois Republicans have described my decision not to vote for Kirk as “misguided,” arguing that with Giannoulias’ youth, we risk having him in the Senate for decades. Well, Kirk too could serve for decades. While my Republican compatriots think even six years of Giannoulias is too high a price to pay, it’s a price I am willing to pay in the hope of preventing a two or three-decade reign by a pro-abortion, pro-homosexual, and deceitful “Republican.” It’s a price I am willing to pay to prevent Kirk from getting a shot at the White House.

These same Republicans argue that the Republican Party desperately needs Kirk’s vote, but what are the crucial upcoming legislative issues for which we desperately need a win and for which we can rely on Kirk for the right vote? We know we won’t get the right votes on any legislation pertaining to the rights of the unborn or the family. Yes, Kirk threw conservatives a bone on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” but as we all know that vote was an anomaly, perhaps motivated by his need to appease social conservatives. And as his vote for cap and trade and against the troop surge prove, we can’t rely on his votes on fiscal or defense issues.

These same Republicans reveal their own deformed moral sensibility when they express more moral outrage about my refusal to nose-hold than they do about Kirk’s support for the slaughter of the unborn. They argue that the battleground was the primary, and now it’s time to rally around the Republican candidate. Some say that in six years, we can try to field a better candidate to run against Kirk in the primary. Really? Do they actually believe that in six years any Republican challenger to an incumbent Senator Kirk would have a shot? Do they actually think the Republican Party would support a challenge to an incumbent Republican senator?

For years I’ve heard Republican strategists and party operatives tell voters that it’s imperative that we do what we’re told, that for the good of the party and the state and the nation, we must vote for the Republican candidate no matter how offensive his positions and no matter how unethical his personal life. And we do. Like obsequious little minions, shamed by being labeled “naïve” “ignorant” or “misguided,” we support with our money and our votes any lousy candidate the Republican establishment parades before us. What have we gotten in the bargain? Mark Kirk.

The IL Republican party and the national Republican Party keep telling us to be good little team players and go along. Not me—not any longer. It strikes me that there is an important difference between justifiable political compromises and wholesale selling out. Voting for Kirk represents the latter. I think that if all the disgruntled IL Republicans would band together and say with their votes “no more. We’re mad as h*** and we’re not gonna take it any more”—even if that means we’re stuck with Giannoulias for six years—the powers-that-be might finally get the message. They might then busy themselves with the important task of finding good candidates.

The right to vote is a precious right, and I’m not willing to squander it on someone who refuses to protect the unborn, who refuses to defend sexual morality, and who, in his desperate and unholy quest to advance those views, lies to Illinoisans. For once, I’m following my moral principles rather than the political dictates of those who have given us Mark Kirk.

Laurie Higgins is a writer based in Deerfield, Illinois.

Mark Kirk has a radical pro-abortion and pro-homosexual-agenda voting record, so most conservatives are not enthused about him becoming the next U.S. Senator from Illinois.

Dear RFFV Readers,

We’re back! With this post by my friend Laurie Higgins, Republicans for Family Values (www.rffv.org) is reactivating after a long silence — just in time for primary elections. The case of Congressman Mark Kirk running as a Republican for U.S. Senate in Illinois is a troubling one: here’s a fellow who voted AGAINST banning partial-birth abortion — and then rationalized the vote to party VIPs and activists as one necessitated by his liberal district (suburbs north of Chicago).

I don’t know which is more pathetic: Kirk’s pandering to pro-abortion feminists, leading him to miss an opportunity to criminalize de facto infanticide; or his sorry attempt to justify it politically. I realize most pseudo-compassionate left-wingers are heartless when it comes to the defenseless unborn, but is there really any congressional district so liberal that it necessitates protecting the gruesome practice of piercing the skull of a late-term unborn baby fully capable of living outside the womb so as to end its (inconvenient) life? Shame on you, Mark!

On the “gay” front, Mr. “Real Integrity” (a Kirk radio ad extols him as a “leader with real integrity”) is one of the most pro-homosexual-agenda of all the Republican legislators on Capitol Hill. According to the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s most powerful homosexual lobby group, Kirk has the following rankings for the last three Congresses (voting with HRC’s misguided agenda) : 85%, 575 and 88% in the 110th, 109th and 108th Congresses, respectively.

In contrast, fellow Illinois Congressman Peter Roskam, also a Republican, has an HRC ranking of zero percent in the 110th Congress (his debut term).

This may explain why radical homosexual “outers” like Mike Rogers are in no hurry to talk about Kirk’s sexual proclivities, since they focus more on secretly homosexual Republicans who have a strong “pro-family” voting record. Of course, as Higgins writes, this would influence a “Senator Kirk” to continue voting pro-homosexual while the “gay” pressure ratchets up for him to reverse his few pro-family votes on the issue as his profile grows in Washington.

Anyway, with Republicans like Kirk in the nation’s capital, who needs Democrats? And Higgins is correct: if Kirk has a personal homosexual issue in his life — I would call it a problem — don’t the voters have a right to know given his radically pro-homosexual voting record ? You bet they do. – Peter LaBarbera, www.RepublicansForFamilyValues.com

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Mark Kirk’s weaselly denial is very Clintonesque

Posted: January 08, 2010

By Laurie Higgins

I taped the Channel 5 news last night [Jan 7], and was mesmerized by Mark Kirk’s performance in the brief excerpt Channel 5 aired in which he decidedly did not deny that he’s homosexual. He used quintessential weasel words in his non-denial, which should infuriate all Illinoisans who believe that engaging in volitional homosexual acts constitutes a character issue and one which very likely influences the policy decisions of legislators.

Here’s Kirk’s exact statement: “It’s ironic that I was there fighting for his rights while he was using his free speech rights to say things which were untrue.”

This is a clever (or not so clever) way of appearing to deny the claim that he is homosexual while never actually denying the claim. He simply referred to “things that were untrue,” which could be any number of things that Andy Martin said.

It’s the same kind of weaselly non-denial as the one issued by Kirk’s campaign in which they said Andy Martin’s ad was untrue, which, of course, is entirely different from saying that Kirk is not homosexual. If at some later time, Kirk and his disciples are compelled to acknowledge that he is, indeed, homosexual, this squishy, expansive marshmallow rhetoric provides the cover they need. It allows Kirk and company to say, for example, that the” untrue things” were Martin’s claim that Raymond True says Kirk has surrounded himself with homosexuals. Kirk seems to be cut from the same weasel cloth as the weasel who infamously said, “I did not have sex with that woman,” and “that depends on what the definition of the word ‘is’ is.”

The indignant huffing and puffing of pundits and politicians on both the left and the right about Martin’s public question strikes me as both amusing and utterly hypocritical. Many of these self-same arbiters of social decorum have been talking about Kirk’s alleged homosexuality for years, and then in high dudgeon they moralistically condemn Martin for publicly discussing the same topic. Granted, due to a history of unsavory actions, Martin makes an easy target, but how about a modicum of truth from the press and our elected officials.

I first heard the Kirk rumor over a year ago from a good friend who worked closely with a current U.S. congresswoman. I was told that it is “well-known secret that Mark Kirk is gay.” It seems that the only people who haven’t heard this well-known secret are those who are asked to vote for him.

The “sexual orientation” of our legislators is relevant for it tells us precisely what they hold to be true about the nature and morality of homosexuality which will likely shape their policy decisions. Those who claim “sexual orientation” is irrelevant are usually those who hold the arguable theories that homosexuality is ontologically equivalent to race and morally equivalent to heterosexuality. Kirk’s distinctly un-Republican voting record on issues related to homosexuality could be explained by his philosophical views and sexual proclivities.

And concealed homosexuality is relevant because it opens up legislators to blackmail: vote a certain way or be outed.

I have heard that Kirk was asked directly by reporters if he is “gay” to which he said “no.” Due, however to some of his and his campaign’s equivocal answers, and the pervasiveness and longevity of the rumors, and the overwhelming disincentives Kirk has to an admission that he is homosexual, the wannabe lawyer in me would be more reassured if Kirk were to say in a written statement “I have never engaged in homosexual activity.” I know, I know, very McCarthy-esque. But after Bill Clinton’s deceit and Mark Foley’s deceit and Larry Craig’s deceit, we can never be too circumspect or precise. One thing the Republican Party does not need is another sex scandal-or another vote that affirms the social and political goals of homosexuals.

Some of Kirk’s evasive, obfuscatory statements have not only intensified questions about his sexual proclivities, but left me with serious doubts about his capacity for unequivocal, unambiguous truth-telling.

Laurie Higgins is the Director of the Division of School Advocacy at the Illinois Family Institute. This article represents her views as an individual and not necessarily those of IFI.