Van Tran acting like a Racist and Gay-baiting Homophobe

I remember the days when people assumed you were gay if you had gay friends. I remember when many would say that a man wearing a pink striped shirt, like the one Van Tran is sporting at left, was “a little light in the loafers.” But today few people would make such assumptions.

I remember the days when being a racist meant you literally believed that a certain race was superior to others. But today most people would call you a racist for other reasons — such as that you favored people of one race, or treated people of different races in different ways.

Well it looks like Assemblyman Van Tran (Wannabe Congressman) is making an art out of acting like a Racist and Gay-baiting Homophobe.

As the Bolsavik reports, “In a paragraph written in Vietnamese but not present in his English-language press release, Assemblyman Van Tran accuses the judge in the Proposition 8 case of being an openly gay man who made his ruling because of gay pressure.”

You can read the English-language press release here, but what you’ll be missing is this paragraph — which appears only in the Vietnamese version, at the beginning:

“The San Francisco area, a place concentrated with homosexual people. Chief Judge Walter [sic] is also an openly gay person, working for the Federal Court of that area. Word is that the judge’s ruling overturning Prop. 8 was the result of personal interest and because of influence by the homosexual groups in the area.”

While it’s absurd for Van Tran to assume that Judge Walker is gay simply because he made a ruling favorable to the LGBT community, what’s remarkable and offensive about this press release is that he’s saying one thing to the English-speaking community and another to the Vietnamese-speaking community.  He figures that his English-speaking readers could find his assumption offensive, so he leaves it out of the English release.

That’s racist.

Bolsavik also points out:

Also included in the Vietnamese version but not the English version is an accusation from Tran that U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez allegedly favors abortion and gay marriage. The Bolsavik hasn’t checked if that’s true, but if true, it’s puzzling why Tran didn’t include that fact in the English copy.

Well, by including that statement, this release becomes nothing more than an election campaign related press statement prepared for by his taxpayer funded Assembly Staff. It seems to me that this might be a violation of both state and federal laws.

Loretta Sanchez told me today that she “has fought for civil rights, human rights, and religious freedom in Vietnam and she supports those same freedoms here in the United States.”Whether freedom of faith freedom of love, it is simply a matter of supporting human rights. “Van Tran is a divider,” Sanchez said; “everything I have been fighting to change in Vietnam, I fight for at home as well.” Sanchez believes that her constituents understand that and will not fall for Tran’s efforts to divide them based on racial or cultural perspectives when it comes to civil rights.

I have to wonder, does Van Tran think less of his English-speaking readers, or of his Vietnamese-speaking readers? Does he think Vietnamese- Amertican people are more likely to be homophobes? Does he think the English-speaking community won’t go along with labeling a judge as gay? Or does he still cling to the outdated idea that a man who supports LGBT people must be gay himself? If so, maybe he’d better get rid of that pink shirt and tie.