Perpetuating the rubbish: Hypocrisy, thy name is News and Tribune.

Hmm.

It's the very same newspaper that runs two weekly Christian advocacy columns, balanced by zero -- zilch, cerro, nada -- "alternative" religion or non-religion essays.

"Maybe we should find out, before passing judgment."

So maybe if Susan Duncan is serious about boosting comparative religious enlightenment, her own newspaper might -- you know, inform us about the alternatives rather than doubling down each week on evangelical Christianity.

Wait ... it might even take the form of a Muslim telling us about Islam. 

Or is Bill Hanson still paying back Tom May for penny ante poker debts by giving May two weekly columns, one of which is plainly evangelical?

DUNCAN COLUMN: Piling on the rubbish, by Susan Duncan

Trash.

I heard the word and my heart sank. The man wasn’t talking about refuse that’s collected and taken to a landfill.

No, he was using the word to describe people. A whole group of people.

With dismissive authority, he said, “Muslims are trash. Every one of ’em.”

He was conversing with a woman as the two were seated near the prescription counter of a local chain drug store. I had wandered into that area in search of an item on my shopping list. Unfortunately, I overheard his world view as I compared products and prices.

How had the man become such an expert on the followers of Islam, I wondered. Had he studied them to know with absolute certainty that Muslims — who number nearly a quarter of the world’s population — all are trash?

Plug in any people of faith from any religion into his original quote: Hindus. Jews. Buddhists.

What if he had said, “Christians are trash. Every one of ’em”? That surely would offend the sensibilities of any followers of Jesus who happened to be within earshot.

So, why is it OK to lump all Muslims together, into the same heap as it were?

The woman tried to add some perspective, I think.

We grew up here, she told her seat mate, and you know as well as I do that there’s white trash, too. The man readily agreed, adding in some blacks, as well. Apparently trash knows no color. It also doesn’t differentiate between heritage and religion.

I wanted to insert myself into their garbage gab, but I knew I wouldn’t change their minds, and I could almost hear the 911 call to police referencing a trio of gray-haired folks scuffling at the pharmacy. It could have gotten ugly in a hurry.

So, my purchase decided, I walked toward the checkout counter, burdened by their words.

The comments struck me as judgmental. Who sits in such an exalted place that they can look down upon others?

Troubling, too, was the casualness of the conversation. The pair just as easily could have been discussing the weather, or the merits of M&Ms vs. Reese’s peanut butter cups.

If I were to label the musings I overheard, I’d call it hate speech. Hate grows from fear, which is rooted in the unknown or the unfamiliar.

In a world of seven and a half billion people, is there anyone as worthy as are we? Anyone?

Maybe we should find out, before passing judgment.

— Susan Duncan is the editor of the News and Tribune. Reach her at 812-206-2130 and susan.duncan@newsandtribune.com.

Maybe this photo explains why Jeff Gahan appeases Dan Coffey's homophobia.

Politics makes strange ... well, you know the rest.

All we can do is feel sorry for some of the other participants in the mayor's cookout. It must be disconcerting knowing that the hope of retaining one's working position requires fealty to those willing to tolerate homophobia, and being compelled to break bread with a bigot.

From earlier this year ...

Dan Coffey's homophobic council tantrum: The Video.

Newspaper's editorial board goes where Dickey, Gahan won't: "New Albany is stuck with Dan Coffey whether residents like him or not."

ON THE AVENUES: Dan Coffey speaks for Jeff Gahan and the Democratic Party … unless they say otherwise.

Sunday reading: Real Indiana and wedges splintering.

A confession: When I land at a newspaper website demanding the answers to stupid questions before being permitted to read the content, I ALWAYS GIVE THE WRONG ANSWERS.

Piss off, Gannett.

Friday's SCOTUS decision on marriage is wonderful, and in Indiana, we still have much work to do.

Locally, this probably means utilizing whatever means are available to extract a clue from the barren consciousness of Ron Grooms, who has learned absolutely nothing from the lessons outlined in these two articles.

It might take until 2018 to pay back Mr. Grooms, by voting against his continued presence in Indianapolis. Let's not forget to do so.

First, Matthew Tully: "Pockets of intolerance and the pettiness of a few influential culture warriors don't define Indiana." I hope he's right.

Dear America, this is the real Indiana, by Matthew Tully (Indy Star)

First, the polls show that the politician most closely tied to the religious freedom debacle, Gov. Mike Pence, continues to pay a severe price for his advocacy of the bill and his handling of the debate. What this shows is that it wasn't only outsiders who were upset with what Pence and his Republican Statehouse allies did. Among the angry were Hoosiers.

Many Hoosiers.

Second, the poll found that Indiana residents strongly support concrete, legally binding actions aimed at inclusiveness. Actions such as the expansion of state civil rights laws to include protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Next, John Krull observes that political wedges are multi-directional.

Note that in response to these latest reversals, the rapidly shrinking Pence is defiant; if the governor cannot defeat the gays, then he'll raise a middle finger to greenhouse gas emission rules.

When wedges no longer work, by John Krull (NUVO)

... But here in quiet, staid Indiana two events have given the political landscape an earthquake-level shake.

The first involved the mayor of Indiana’s fourth-largest city, Democrat Pete Buttigieg of South Bend. Buttigieg is a former Rhodes Scholar and a Navy reservist who was deployed to Afghanistan for seven months last year ...

... Then, hours later, a poll conducted by a respected GOP pollster – and paid for by Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels’ first campaign manager, Republican Bill Oesterle – showed that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (also a Republican) is in real political trouble.

ON THE AVENUES: This is Dan Coffey, New Albany’s quintessential Democrat.

ON THE AVENUES: This is Dan Coffey, New Albany’s quintessential Democrat.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Dan Coffey is a Democrat.

I know, I know.

Go and paste a photo of Coffey into Google Images, and the magical search engine yields various glamour shots of none other than Governor Mike Pence.*

But as Coffey surely would remind you in his very best caterwauling drawl, “that Ol’ Man Goggle ain’t from HERE, is he?”

And HERE, in New Albany and Floyd County, reverting to the curiously deceptive dialect spoken by those who have their obscure reasons for not being publicly identified as Republican in a benighted place where only two options for political affiliation are permitted, Coffey remains a card-carrying, fully sanctioned and purely customary Democrat.

In fact it says so, right there, at the Floyd County Democratic Party’s web site.

Dan Coffey is a Democrat.

He also is an unreconstructed homophobe, a serial bully, and a perennial opportunist. He has occupied a council seat since the year 2000, and during all that time, while amassing a record of non-achievement notable even by New Albany’s subterranean standards, he never once has troubled himself with deep thoughts about prayers and invocations, apart from repeating them by rote, mindlessly, along with everyone else in the council chamber.

Then along came “them people” asking for their rights, and all of a sudden, Coffey sprang forward to defend the faith from these godless heathens, of whom I surely must be numbered as one. For reason of my atheism, perhaps my testimony is unreliable to some. However, as it pertains to Coffey’s most recent council displays or righteousness, you needn’t take my heretical word for it.

The following forceful and passionate passage was written by a certified believer, the Rev. John Manzo of St. Marks United Church of Christ, and posted at Facebook. Seems Coffey might not be speaking on behalf of all the city’s Christians.

The other night God got mocked at the City Council meeting.

Councilman Dan Coffey swore at another member of the Council by calling him a "lying piece of (expletive)" during a debate over public prayer on Monday.

Later, Mr. Coffey said, "No, I didn't bring this up to curry favor," Coffey said, hitting his hand against the council's desk. "I brought it up because every time you turned around, there was something coming up about gays, lesbians, transvestites and making sure they had their rights."

The council then considered an amendment that would've allowed members only to pray, give an inspirational message, or to skip their turn in the rotation.

"If someone chooses to say a prayer, that's fine," Councilman Greg Phipps said. "I they choose to read an inspirational poem, that's fine."

"I can hear it now, 'tiptoe through tulips,'" Coffey replied in reference to a gay person presenting a prayer or a devotional reading.

This was all bad an offensive in and of itself. Swearing at a colleague and bashing people is offensive behavior in and of itself. This, out of context is just bad behavior that doesn’t mock God. But in context, wow.

Mr. Coffey was promoting and advocating for a bill to mandate prayer at the City Council meetings. He swore while advocating, seemingly, for God. He mocked people while saying he was advocating for God. He was promoting prayer.

This is worse than Bill Maher. Mr. Maher regularly mocks religious people but he doesn’t believe in God. He’s a comedian. He’s an entertainer. I often find him to be offensive but he does no harm to Christianity because he simply doesn’t believe in God. I don’t take him seriously.

The problem with what Mr. Coffey did is that he was acting like he was protecting God and protecting religion. He wasn’t. He was being offensive and saying he was doing this in God’s name. That mocks God. As a pastor of a church in downtown New Albany I find his actions deeply offensive. He made a mockery of those who us who take our faith seriously and pray. My hope and prayer is that he takes time at the next Council meeting to apologize to his colleagues for his offensive behavior, but most of all, to the people of faith for his vulgar mockery of God.

Hmm. Did I mention that Coffey is a Democrat?

This Democrat, when handed the gift of tailor-made grandstanding, abruptly coiled like a copperhead and stung like a Pharisee, professing hitherto unwitnessed allegiance to points of order, and volunteering to explicate obscure passages of Constitutional law which have confused genuine scholars since before the ink was dry on the original document.

Coffey, a Democrat, knew fully well the camera was focused on him, and so he was suitably explicit for the viewing audience at home, because he no longer can suppress his revulsion at the inexorable advance of the Sodomites.

Dan Coffey?

He’s a Democrat, and he knows that as a Democrat in New Albany and Floyd County, he is perfectly free to say and believe and do anything, or nothing, however egregious, nasty and untruthful, because there’ll always be a fellow “Democrat” in need of the sin-eating services of a small-pond operative utterly devoid of scruples or ethical sensibility.

Dan Coffey’s been HERE his whole life, and he merely shrugs. How can it be a crime if there isn’t any punishment … ever?

It has been ten days since this episode of KoffeyKulturKampf was aired on the boob tube, as recounted evenly and accurately by Pastor Manzo, who has been joined by the LGBT community and numerous other fair-minded individuals in expressing revulsion.

Our leaders tend to be Democrats, just like Dan Coffey, and they ... are silent.

The Floyd County Democratic Party has said absolutely nothing. Mayor Jeff Gahan, like Coffey a Democrat, and moreover, quite content to deploy Coffey as his dull, blunt Sancho Panza, to be wielded in pursuit of his and the party’s monetization aims, has remained mum.

Both party and mayor invite you to go swimming, and forget about the rest.

Of Coffey’s city council colleagues, six of whom are Democrats, only one has referred to the landmark council evening publicly, and yet  John Gonder’s welcomed critique was mostly oblique, as usual, and his brave but doomed loyalty to a political party – to his own Democratic Party – itself largely in connivance with Coffey’s and Gahan’s despicable targeting of Gonder for defeat in the November election, is elegiac, fated and shaded with melancholy.

Ideals, anyone?

Four years ago, Jeff Gahan’s stated aim in seeking the office of mayor was to somehow alchemize New Albany into a “fundamentally” better municipality.

As Coffey’s recent human rights slurs abundantly illustrate, this has not occurred. In fact, it has not begun.

Fundamentals are basic, underlying, core standards. They must exist to serve as the foundation for what follows. They are the procedures and protocols defining more universal matters like human and civil rights, but also those daily markers wrongly viewed by many as mundane, including topics like the demeanor, practices and expectations of public officials and employees, and their bodies, boards and commissions.

Dan Coffey is a Democrat, and his peers would rather enjoy weekly colonoscopies than call his bluff.

There are no fundamental guidelines available for needed discipline, save one: The ballot box, except that Coffey had no challengers in his party’s primary in May; the GOP apparently refuses to run a candidate against him; and no independent alternative has emerged.

Dan Coffey, Democrat?

Might as well – and a lean, mean Democrat at that, mercifully stripped of any platform compliance obligations or other burdensome adornments resembling anything remotely democratic, with upper- and lower-case meaningless, and thus completely interchangeable.

Apart from the many citizens Coffey has openly denounced, he also has humiliated his nominal political party, his cowering patron of a mayor, and the entire city, for good measure. Each and every one of us looks bad at the present time.

And Dan Coffey, the Democrat, is winning.

He is winning by default.

Even by New Albany’s traditionally subterranean standards, that’s absolutely appalling.

---

* When I pasted this into Google Images ...

... this was returned.

---

Recent columns:

June 4: ON THE AVENUES: Dan Coffey speaks for Jeff Gahan and the Democratic Party … unless they say otherwise.

May 28: ON THE AVENUES: The last of the summer beer.

May 21: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: "I Just Want to Know, Can I Park Here Somewhere?”

May 14: ON THE AVENUES: Take this cult of personality and shove it.

May 7: ON THE AVENUES: In Havel I trust.

April 30: ON THE AVENUES: Until philosophers become kings.

ON THE AVENUES: Dan Coffey speaks for Jeff Gahan and the Democratic Party … unless they say otherwise.

ON THE AVENUES: Dan Coffey speaks for Jeff Gahan and the Democratic Party … unless they say otherwise.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

For many New Albany residents, the WAVE 3 video of 1st district councilman Dan Coffey’s antics during Monday’s prayer – I mean, council – meeting, during which Coffey made intemperate and homophobic remarks, then denied them even as he was chased down the stairs by the reporter, have proven shocking.

In sad fact, they’re the time-tested norm.

Many of these same residents promptly took to social media, asking why the Floyd County Democratic Party and our incumbent mayor, Jeff Gahan, for whom Coffey has recently served as unofficial council whip and “fundamentally better” enforcer, both have failed to comment on the situation.

You guessed it: Mute Democratic impotence also is the norm hereabouts.

I’ve been describing Coffey’s frequent outbursts at NA Confidential for a very long time. His career in playacting at public service has been an embarrassment to his party and the city in myriad ways since before I even began attending meetings in 2004, but there is "Something Different" about the most recent episode of the Wizard of Westside’s frothing at the mouth.

It was captured on video.

But there’s a twist, because I think Coffey planned it that way.

Why?

That’s how much he hates gays, lesbians and transvestites.

---

It’s worth remembering that Joe Stalin attended seminary school before embarking on his stellar career of thuggery and mayhem, and in like fashion, Dan Coffey’s belated discovery of prayer has not been meant to bring him a step closer to a ragpicker’s sainthood.

Rather, it has been a convenient means to an end. It’s been about inciting and assembling an angry mob – like the crowd of angry “Christians” who gathered a few meetings back to learn who was taking their cherished rituals away – which can be called back to the podium when needed.

Of course, in this case, it’s been about three years since council protocol changed, with nary a peep from Coffey. He didn’t care an iota about the Lord’s Prayer, not then or now; it merely was another chit to be safeguarded whilst nursing his elderly white man’s panoply of grudges, at least until the right cue came along.

Coffey got his chance when the council resolved to denounce the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Astronauts on orbiting space stations could see him salivate in anticipation.

You see, the gays, lesbians and transvestites had taken it a step too far … and it was time to declare Coffey Jihad Time by paying them back with the resumption of invocations.

True enough, only Sigmund Freud himself might be able to establish the Coffey-concocted connection between prayer and sexual orientation, but if Freud were reincarnated and attended a council meeting, Coffey would start prattling on about the Jews taking over.

And a majority of his colleagues wouldn’t say a damned single word about it.

---

That’s because Coffey is accustomed to saying and doing as he pleases; after all, he’s a Democrat, and generations of council presidents have been Democrats, too, and none of them have ever tried very hard to discipline Coffey.

Current president Pat McLaughlin treats his gavel as though it had only recently been dipped in Ebola jam, and he cannot so much as use the restroom until the Gahan gives him a signal via earbuds. Coffey’s been bullying his cohorts for years. He knew the cameras were there, knew he could do as he pleased, and knew he’d not be censured for it.

That’s how enduringly tone-deaf Gahan and the Democratic Party have become.

Yes, Dan Coffey’s behavior is routinely despicable, but the Democratic Party persists in enabling him. With few ethical principles of their own to promote, local Democrats jokingly handle their “Coffey problem” by siding with Lyndon Baines Johnson’s preferred method of dealing with J. Edgar Hoover:

“Better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than the other way around.”

More importantly, ostensibly "respectable" elements in the party are forever in need of Coffey’s services as sin eater, and to launder their own bile. They won’t say it aloud – but Dan sure will! They believe they can use Coffey, and even if he usually turns the tables and uses THEM, non-democratic Democrats get exactly what they need in the interim.

What’s more, Coffey's invoice doesn't go to the Democratic Party. Rather, the entire city pays it, again and again, in a loss of civic reputation … and of remaining a regional backwater.

---

I’m hoping to be proven wrong, but there’s as much chance of Dan Coffey being censured for his most recent bullying as the aquatic center actually paying for itself.

Way back in 2009, when Coffey physically threatened my colleague and friend Jeff Gillenwater, only one council member, John Gonder, had the intestinal fortitude to suggest that Coffey deserved some form of censure.

The other council members sat and stared at the floor.

I watched them look the other way, ducking and covering, and I’ll watch them do it again, this time, all the while remaining pathetically incapable of grasping why they’re regarded as political laughingstocks by anyone in town who takes the time to observe them in twice monthly repose.

What of Jeff Gahan? Dan Coffey has been Gahan’s loyal, groveling Sancho Panza. Will the mayor emerge from his bunker to reassure the LGBT community that Coffey does not speak for him?

I doubt it. Gahan believes what he reads on the city’s Facebook page, which is updated by a paid contractor, who provides precisely what its client wants to hear. A typical animated Disney feature contains more reality than this.

Coffey’s snarling disregard for the rules of simple human civility is a nasty symptom of the rot within, one that is being left to fester by mayor and council alike. Coffey is a nasty bigot, all right, but far more significantly that this, he’s an apt metaphor for the diseased existence of the local Democratic Party, which now operates purely from a principle of machine monetization.

It’s more Republican than ever before. There’s a lot of censure to go around.

None of it will.

Think of it as the sorrow of New Albany.

---

Recent columns:

May 28: ON THE AVENUES: The last of the summer beer.

May 21: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: "I Just Want to Know, Can I Park Here Somewhere?”

May 14: ON THE AVENUES: Take this cult of personality and shove it.

May 7: ON THE AVENUES: In Havel I trust.

April 30: ON THE AVENUES: Until philosophers become kings.

April 27: ON THE AVENUES MONDAY SPECIAL: Et tu, Greg Phipps? Or: Anger and the electoral variability of transparency.

Mount Tone Deaf just doesn't have the same ring, does it?

It's simple, If the Democratic Party and Mayor Jeff Gahan can't step outside their soulless political machines (and bunkers) to disavow Dan Coffey's homophobia and bigotry, then they're endorsing Coffey's behavior.

Dan Coffey's homophobic council tantrum: The Video.

Dan Coffey, on fire.

Listen as Coffey maligns two of his council colleagues while the body's president sits inert and motionless.

Flinch as Coffey explains that reconstituted council prayer is necessary in light of the constant agitation of gays, lesbians and transvestites.

Guffaw as the WAVE reporter follows the Wizard of Westside down the stairway of a public building as the Wizard flees.

Worst of all: Recoil when you consider that Coffey is one of New Albany's highest ranking Democrats, and a veritable pillar of Adam Dickey's party machine.

Welcome to Jeff Gahan's New Albany, in a nutshell.

Fundamentally more bigoted.

Longtime homophobe Coffey offers heartfelt prayer for his "lying piece of (expletive)" colleague.

Prayer duly restored, the Ayatollah Coffey will now decide whether your religion deserves his stamp of approval.

Pence, Grooms, other old bigoted white guys sadly united in both spite and cluelessness.

As so many have noted, this isn't Mike Pence's first dance as it exalts plainly purposeful discrimination, and as As the Indy Star's Matthew Tully succinctly observes, Pence is "out of his league as governor."

When you have to "clarify" a horribly damaging piece of legislation that you raced to sign, when you dodge a question on national TV about whether discrimination is legal in your state, when you deal your state a crushing economic blow, when you seem incapable of understanding the role you have played in creating this mess — well, that makes clear that you are not in the right job.

I'd place our state senator, the bizarrely oblivious Ron Grooms, in the same category. He isn't governor, so he gets a pass? He shouldn't. First tolls, now RFRA; is Grooms intent on sealing the border with the bulk of the metro Louisville market?

Back to Tully on Pence:

As a politician he is above all an ideologue, one whose actions and distractions have made clear that he doesn't truly understand what it takes to take on the state's massive challenges. He thrived while representing a gerrymandered congressional district, one where he could safely walk an ideological line and live largely in a partisan bubble. He has failed to understand that a governor's job is to represent a much more diverse state.

Old white guys living in bubbles. Spare me. Here is Frank Rich with more national ramifications of the Hoosier Stain.

Indiana, Arkansas, and the GOP’s Disastrous Anti-Gay Bigotry, by Frank Rich (New York)

... Other defenders of these laws, like The Wall Street Journal editorial page, are predictably pleading victimization: The real victims of bigotry, according to this argument, are Christians, who are being punished for unfashionable beliefs. The Bible has a long history of being cited in America to justify second-class citizenship for women and blacks, among others, in their struggles for equal rights over the past century. It didn’t fly then, and it won’t fly now. A GOP presidential field that supports transparent discrimination is not only on the wrong side of history but the wrong side of the present-day American electorate. There will be consequences far beyond the economic punishment that is already being inflicted on Indiana.