Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Today on the Signorile Show

Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum, is speaking out about his relationship with Rentboy customer and antigay crusader George Rekers, saying about his payments to Rekers for "expert testimony," that " I wouldn’t do it again if I knew what I knew today but I didn't know that then and neither did anybody else.’’Now we learn that McCollum personally requested Rekers. Remember to join Equality Florida's campaign to hold Bill McCollum accountable for hiring Reker's and to not pass the blame.

Meanwhile, Jovanni Roman, the young man at the center of the story, has been speaking up about the Reker's scandal. He has leaked Facebook messages between him and Reker's and told the Miami New Times Reker's told him "He's told me that he's hired other escorts, and it's never really worked out... They don't talk enough, or they've had very weird circumstances... Basically, he's never been fully comfortable with the situation, or they've jipped him. Jipped him of time or money." We'll get into more of the Reker's scandal this afternoon.

Yesterday, we spoke a lot about President Obama's choice of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to replace Justice Stevens on the Supreme Court. While there is still a lot we don't know about Kagan, there are little bits of information coming out leading up to her confirmation hearings. An issue that is getting a lot of attention is that of abortion and where she stands on this issue. In 1997, while she was an adviser to President Bill Clinton, she sent a memo to his office urging the president "to support a ban on late-term abortions, a political compromise that put the administration at odds with abortion rights groups... The documents from Clinton's presidential library are among the first to surface in which Kagan weighs in on the thorny issue of abortion." Will this be the issue that gets a lot of attention during her hearings? We'll discuss today.

Guest / 4:30pm EST - We have come to understand that psychiatry has made great progress in diagnosing and treating mental illnesses, but the number of people on government disabilities has risen nearly tripled in the past twenty years. Journalist and author Robert Whitaker joins us today to answer this question in his new book Anatomy Of An Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness In America.

After months of criticism over the sexual abuse scandals coming out of the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI has finally spoken directly about the issue. On his way to Portugal, Benedict said "that the 'sins inside the church' posed the greatest threat to Catholicism, adding that 'forgiveness does not substitute justice.'" Will we see action from this Pope to right the wrongs within the Catholic Church? Are the Pope's words sincere enough to be offered as an apology or are his words too little, too late?

We'll talk about these stories and so much more, today on The Michelangelo Signorile Show!

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