DALLAS, Texas—Remember way back in 2016 when the Dallas City Council, largely at the insistence of religio-conservative oil baron Ray Lee Hunt, passed a resolution that prohibited the manager of the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center from entering into a contract with Three Expo Events LLC, the owners of the Exxxotica Lifestyle Expo, for Exxxotica to once again take over the convention center for a weekend of sexy fun?
Remember the terrific reasons the council had for passing that resolution?
"One of the very early lessons I learned in life is, you don't go where you're not welcome," said District 7 Councilwoman Tiffinni A. Young during the council meeting. "This is not something that this city supports. This is not something you look forward to as something for our children to look up to and see around in the community."
(For a city that "didn't support" Exxxotica, it had a funny way of showing it. More than 15,000 locals attended the show at the convention center in 2015, even with church groups and Republicans constantly picketing.)
"I'm not going to be silent about this," declared District 13 Councilwoman Jennifer S. Gates. "I'm not going to be silent about an industry that's exploiting women and children, and you know what? If that makes more people attend, then more people attend, but my silence isn't an excuse."
(Just one problem with that: The previous week, the council had had a closed-door meeting with the Dallas police chief, the city's Vice Squad and other officials who had attended Exxxotica 2015, and the officials all assured the councilmembers that nothing untoward or illegal had happened during the convention.)
"I just can't see that the Framers of our Constitution and the writings in the Federalist Papers in no way believe in the unbridled or unrestricted right to allow pornography to be displayed in a public facility. There's something wrongheaded about that," opined District 5's Richey D. Callahan. "If you think the display of leather and whips and viewing folks in dominatrix outfits or suggestions of sadomasochism or anything that they're marketing—again, there's three X's in there, folks. You've seen it on the billboards. We're not talking about one X, we're not talking about soft porn; they're marketing with those three X's. Now, whether or not they actually do it or not, it doesn't matter. They want you to think that, 'Man, this is real stuff, XXX.' But if you think that's okay, then you go ahead and support that, but I'm not going to."
But guess who they do support?!?
"Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, a self-proclaimed Democrat in a nonpartisan office [and author of the anti-Exxxotica resolution], made a frustrated, impromptu speech Thursday morning after attending a bank's ribbon-cutting in West Dallas, saying now is the time for a blue-ribbon panel to take on the country's gun problem," wrote Stephen Young of the Dallas Observer in mid-February. "Rawlings didn't mention one of the biggest creators of that problem, the National Rifle Association, which will post up at Dallas' Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center for its annual convention in a couple of months. ... The first weekend in May, the NRA, thousands of its members and dozens of conservative politicians will descend on Dallas for the gun-rights organization's annual get-together, which includes a trade show, classes, seminars and a leadership forum."
Among the reasons Rawlings' spokesflack Scott Goldstein gave Young for why the NRA was just hunky-dory for the venue but Exxxotica wasn't were: 1) "Exxxotica fraudulently misrepresented the existence of the entity that would be leasing the facility." (Untrue; Three Expo's J. Handy explained in court papers that the contracting entity, Exxxotica Dallas, was a subsidiary of Three Expo); 2) "Exxxotica fraudulently represented the manner in which the convention would be operated." (No, it didn't, and this was the first time such a claim had been put forth); 3) "Exxxotica permitted operations that violated their own policy of how the convention would be operated." (Another newly announced lie); 4) "Exxxotica committed Penal Code violations (sexual contact and public lewdness)." (Not according to the cops, who spent several hours at the 2015 convention and testified to the council that they'd seen no violations); and 5) "Exxxotica illegally operated a sexually oriented business." (Another lie; the city attorney told the council that the S.O.B. laws didn't apply to Exxxotica since it was only a "temporary presence.")
So let's spend a moment delving into why the NRA is so much better suited to use the convention center than Exxxotica would have been—and we need go no farther than the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), now taking place in the Washington, D.C. suburb of National Harbor, MD.
"What they [gun control advocates] want are more restrictions on the law-abiding," NRA VP and CEO Wayne LaPierre told a friendly audience at CPAC on Thursday. "Think about that: their solution is to make you, all of you, less free. ... If they seize power, our American freedoms could be lost and our country will be changed forever. Socialism is a movement that loves a smear."
The "socialists" to whom LaPierre was referring were the thousands of students from across the country who spent last week confronting their representatives in state houses and in congress to push for legislation to prevent future mass slaughters like the one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
"As usual, the opportunists waited not one second to exploit tragedy for political gain,” LaPierre added. "Chris Murphy, Nancy Pelosi, and more, cheered on by the national media, eager to blame the NRA and call for more government control.
"The shameful politicization of tragedy—it’s a classic strategy, right out of the playbook of a poisonous movement. They hate the NRA. They hate the Second Amendment. They hate individual freedom," LaPierre declared."The elites don’t care one wit about school children. If they truly cared, they would protect them. ... It’s not a safety issue, it’s a political issue. They care more about control. Their goal is to eliminate the Second Amendment and our firearms freedoms so they can eliminate all individual freedoms.
"They don’t care if their laws work or not," he added. "They just want get more laws to get more control over people. But the NRA, the NRA does care."
And how, pray tell, does the NRA show that care, aside from opposing increased background checks for potential gun buyers, and opposing the ban of assault rifles and enlarged ammunition clips?
LaPierre concluded this year’s speech by repeating the advice he provided in the wake of the Newtown mass shooting five years ago: "The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."
Funny thing about that: The one guy who did have a gun at Parkland was sheriff's deputy Scot Peterson, who spent the entire massacre "seeking cover behind a concrete column leading to a stairwell," said fellow Officer Tim Burton. (UPDATE: Make that four more armed deputies who hid behind squad cars rather than tackle the shooter.) (UPDATE #2: And then there's been all that talk about arming teachers, which PZ Myers puts the lie to.)
But LaPierre wasn't the only complete asshole to speak for the NRA at CPAC: There was also former radio host/former Breitbart News editor-in-chief Dana Loesch, an official spokeswhore for the NRA—and she began by attacking mainstream media.
"Many in legacy media love mass shootings," she told the crowd. "You love the ratings. Crying white mothers are ratings gold."
Loesch was apparently referring to a recent conservative meme perhaps best expressed in a Washington Times editorial, which stated, "The dead were not even buried from the Florida school shooting before the partisan hacks and jackals in the press showed up. With glowing eyes and snarling in the darkness, they were on the scent of a fresh kill they could exploit to advance their own political agenda. And, of course, to goose TV ratings. It was a gnarly NASCAR crash—without a race. Pure political porn...
"The only villains present were the team of rolling cameras from CNN, which hosted the so-called 'town hall.' It was more like hecklers at a funeral. Desperate for viewers, CNN was offering up-close rubber-necking of a mass crime where 17 people—mostly children—were killed by a very sick person. CNN was there to capture all the agony from innocent people at their most vulnerable. Reality TV carnage. Even better than the network’s usual jubilant search for crashed airliners."
And once again, it wasn't the NRA itself which had any blame for the shooting, but the media and government: "Where are the stories about how only 38 states submit less than 80 percent of criminal convictions to the background check system? It’s only as good as what is submitted to it … I have to question whether they want this system to fail. Where are those headlines?... It is not our job to follow up on red flags.... It is not our job; a failure of law enforcement is not a failure of the law. It is a failure of enforcement."
Right!!! Or as political commentator Ana Marie Cox noted on Twitter, "Loesch also says that she 'speaks for the NRA' when she says she supports 'stronger background checks.' Quoting from the NRA website: 'NRA opposes expanding firearm background check systems.'"
Loesch also blamed the FBI, and particularly fired director James Comey, for the murders: "Maybe if you politicized your agency less and did your job more, we wouldn’t have these problems," she blustered.
Yup, those are just the sort of people who deserve to hold their annual convention in the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, not those degenerates who support adults having fun with dildos rather than their metal penis-substitutes, and favor people getting off with foreplay rather than gunplay.
Or as late-night New York radio host Jean Shepherd used to end his broadcasts many years ago: "Excelsior, you fatheads!"
(For a brief rundown of Exxxotica's dispute with Dallas, see stories here, here, here, here, here and here.)
