This is so heartwarming:
The day Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen told his prominent parents about his new gender identity, he did so in a letter that he left on their bed. Then he grabbed a packed bag and, unsure of whether he would be welcomed back, went to a friend’s house to see if his family would love him or leave him.
His shocked parents, Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Miami Republican, and Dexter Lehtinen, who served as the top federal prosecutor here, did not hesitate. They grabbed the phone and told him that they loved him and that family trumped all, and asked him to come home. But as with many parents of transgender children, they were also overwhelmed by fear: The future they saw for their then 21-year-old, whom they had named Amanda, would be pockmarked with discrimination and bullying, if not outright violence.
It was this visceral reaction to want to protect her child that drove Ms. Ros-Lehtinen to break from her party’s skepticism or hostility on gay and transgender issues — a stance evident now in North Carolina’s battle over transgender bathroom visits — and become a conspicuous advocate in Congress and more recently in public service announcements. On Monday, Ms. Ros-Lehtinen, her husband and her son, now 30, will appear in the latest one for SAVE, a longtime South Florida gay rights group that hopes to engage the Latino community here.
Isn’t it heartwarming? I mean my heart isn’t just warm, it’s burning. It is simply wonderful how Republicans will break with their party when it affects them personally, while remaining in lockstep on everything else. Empathy, it appears, stops at the front door. Among the many slimy things Ros-Lehtinen has done, according to her Wikipedia page (and I’d point out that politician’s Wikipedia pages are sometimes edited favorably by supporters or aides):
Ros-Lehtinen played a key role in keeping the International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act of 2010 from being passed into law. Although the bill had unanimously passed the Senate with bipartisan support, she persuaded enough Republicans in the House to vote against the bill so that it did not receive the required two-thirds majority. She reportedly invoked concerns about the legislation’s cost and that funds could be used to promote abortion.
This is standard stuff for Republicans. Here in Groton we had a state Senator with a son who was intellectually disabled. She couldn’t do enough for that group of people, yet her empathy for the unfortunate seemed to stop right there. Republicans have difficulty walking a mile in anyone else’s shoes; if the shoe doesn’t fit exactly, it is simply far too uncomfortable for them to wear.
The result for Ros-Lehtinen? A puff piece in the New York Times, with nary a word about the fact that in all other respects, she is a right wing horror show and that the odds are that if it were not for Rodrigo, she’d be with the rest of the Republicans, protecting us from those bathroom monsters we didn’t even know existed a year ago. Far more worthy of praise that they never get are the many Democrats with no personal stake in the issue that support the gay and transgender communities.
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