Maybe Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) should just stop hosting press conferences altogether. He’s clearly not having any luck with them.
Last month, the conservative Republican senator held a Capitol Hill event to showcase accident victims who had been treated with their own stem cells. Brownback ended up asking the injured young women to stand up and walk around to show everyone how healthy they were, but their injuries prevented them from leaving their wheelchairs.
A Hill staffer on hand for the farce described the event as “cruel.” Worse, the women and their families publicly denounced the White House’s opposition to embryonic stem-cell research, which is the opposite of Brownback’s message. Oops.
Unfortunately for the senator, he had more press-conference misfortune yesterday.
Brownback had invited several clergy to the Hill to speak in opposition to gay marriage, presumably to drum up support for the FMA vote. Once again, Brownback seemed clueless about what his “guests” were going to tell a room full of reporters.
One of Brownback’s invitees, for example, sounded like a homophobic loon.
Rabbi Yehuda Levin, of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis and the Rabbinical Alliance said members of Congress should not hire gays in their offices and should reject the pressures of “homosexual political operatives.”
He added:
“We, the normal family people … we will out you the good, old-fashioned way this November in the voting booths.”
When Levin was done, Bishop Harry Jackson of the Hope Christian Church in Bowie, Md., abandoned Brownback’s conservative message in the other direction, arguing that gay couples should have civil rights such as insurance and health care.
Eventually, the senator had to explain to the reporters on hand that he had no idea what was going on at his own press event.
“You’re seeing representatives of various religious groups,” Brownback said. “Now, not all of us agree with everything that each of us says.”
When bad photo-ops happen to misguided politicians…