Marriage on the Rocks, By MAUREEN DOWD

[jefferson_dem]

Marriage on the Rocks
By MAUREEN DOWD
Los Angeles

Dianne Feinstein is not sure she’ll ever be able to watch the movie “Milk,” even though she’s in it.

There is 1978 footage of a stricken Feinstein in the opening minutes of the new Gus Van Sant biopic of Harvey Milk, her colleague on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the first openly gay elected official in American history. (Sean Penn soars as Milk.)

“I was the one who found his body,” the California senator told me Friday, on route from the airport to her home in San Francisco. “To get a pulse, I put my finger in a bullet hole. It was a terrible, terrible time in the city’s history.”

The movie, chronicling the rancorous California fight of gay activists against church-backed forces in the ’70s to prevent discrimination against gays, is opening amid a rancorous California fight of gay activists against church-backed forces to prevent discrimination against gays.

Milk was gunned down by Dan White, who had served on the board with Milk and Feinstein. White, an Irish Catholic former policeman and Vietnam vet, opposed Milk’s equal rights initiatives for gays. He resigned and immediately wanted his seat back, a move Milk helped persuade the mayor, George Moscone, to reject. White climbed through a City Hall basement window with a loaded gun and shot down Moscone and then Milk. (In the infamous “Twinkie defense,” White argued that junk food had left him stressed out.)

I asked Senator Feinstein, who became mayor after the tragedy, if she would see the movie.

“It’s very painful for me,” she replied. “It took me seven years before I could sit in George Moscone’s chair. It took me a long time to talk about it. I was only recently able to talk about it.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/opinion/23dowd.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

[hlthe2b]

1. Wow... Dowd can be quite effective when she...

leaves the snark behind.... Well worth reading.

[tomreedtoon]

3. Her only moral qualm: don't make fun of murdered gay guys.

She'll slime current, former and deceased Presidents, claim knowledge about anything and everything, and slam any woman. But she won't say anything nasty about Harvey Milk because, where she lives in Manhattan, the gay community can seriously impact her phony-baloney lifestyle.

Don't think Dowd has any redeeming human-like qualities. She only picks on targets that can't hurt her.

[Boo Boo]

2. One problem...

She says black and Latino voters surged to polls and also voted for prop 8, but the breakdown of whites vs. Latino that voted for 8 was roughly equal. We don't know which voted for 8 in greater numbers, because the difference was well inside the margin of error for an exit poll.