Soundbites

If you ask Bob Casey Jr.’s campaign aides (and we did), they’ll tell you that their man is busily criss-crossing the state getting his message out. But it’s a few notable absences from the public radar that have caught our attention. At a televised candidate’s forum in Hershey last Monday, sponsored by the Pennsylvania Association of Township Supervisors, Casey’s Democratic primary opponent Ed Rendell squared off against Republican Mike Fisher in a spirited debate on the issues. Casey, however, was nowhere to be seen. Then, the latest issue of Harrisburg magazine featured the cover story, “Who will be the next governor of Pennsylvania?” with prominent photos of Rendell and Republican candidate Mike Fisher on the cover. Bob Casey Jr. doesn’t appear on the cover and wasn’t interviewed for the story. What gives? Not only did Bob’s people refuse to participate in the cover story, according to editor Lisa Paige, they got nasty when the reporter persisted in asking. “They called the associate editor and said they weren’t interested and to get [writer Chris Courogen] to stop calling,” Paige says. “We tried our best to reach Casey through other means, but to no avail, so finally we gave up.” Courogen says, “[Casey press secretary] Troy Colbert said that I was harassing them. I never, never harassed them. Like any reporter, I was consistent and fair and tried my best to include everyone. I was willing to accommodate any time or date they gave me, and continued trying up to and past my deadline. They never said to me that they weren’t interested, I was just endlessly put off and delayed.” So where was Bob, and why all the hubbub? Repeated calls to Colbert for comment -- everybody now! -- were not returned before press time.

“The Big Bambino, Mayor Frank Rizzo, was a towering hulk of a man. Tough, resilient, stubborn and cut from a John Wayne mold, the mayor could also be charismatic and warm. In an interview conducted with him shortly before his death in the early 1990s, he spoke tenderly of a police officer friend dying of AIDS. As a former police chief, however, officers under him routinely rounded up gay men. The author and a friend were taken into custody one summer night in 1974 while talking on a doorstep. Once inside the van we discovered 10 gay men all plucked from the sidewalk. As the van made its way to the city’s roundhouse, or temporary jail, the driver would occasionally point to other men on the street perceived to be gay and, once again, the van would pull over. … Due to [Rizzo’s] ambivalence toward gays and lesbians, most in the community would not consider him a friend. He was charming, however, and could win over his staunchest enemies with his powerful personal charisma. During an interview with the author, Rizzo spoke in a style that he used to disarm his critics. He finished the interview with a friendly, ‘Anything you want to say about me you can say it, anything you want to add -- no problem.’”

--from Gay and Lesbian Philadelphia (Arcadia Publishing), by local journalist Thom Nickels, now available in bookstores.

Penn students should be forgiven if they mistook the eight-page glossy supplement (pictured below) in last Thursday's Daily Pennsylvanian for an Old Navy circular. In fact it was an informational booklet from Human Life Alliance (www.humanlife.org), a St. Paul-based organzation that specializes in bringing the anti-abortion message to campuses (more than 1 million pieces of literature distributed on nearly 200 campuses, including Temple's, last year alone). Polling has shown that high school- and college-aged people tend to tune out obviously anti-abortion materials because they "immediately associate pro-life with violence," says Jenni Speltz, Human Life Alliance's director of campus outreach. So in recent years the group has avoided using recognizable photos and slogans in an effort to get young people to actually peruse the content (which, for the record, does not advocate violence in any way). And it seems to work; Speltz says that the organization has gotten much more feedback since going that route. Not everyone who responds is friendly, she admits, but that's OK too -- at least they were exposed to the material and thought about it. "Our message is not only to educate people," Speltz explains, "but to bring the pro-life message back to what it was in the beginning."

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