Happy Hour Headlines: Rainbow Rips DeVos, Rippon Lets It Rip, and More

No one hangs people with their own words like Randy Rainbow. We were stoked to see him finally get face time with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Over the Rainbow

Hot on the heels of her disastrous appearance on 60 Minutes last Sunday, video luminary Randy Rainbow took his opportunity to make sure that DeVos had sufficiently fallen on her own sword. Several times.

Education secretary DeVos stumbled repeatedly through her brush with CBS reporter Lesley Stahl, first telling her that the government “should be funding and investing in students, not in school — school buildings, not in institutions, not in systems” seemingly ignorant of the notion that it is students who attend these schools she’s not interested in funding. She offered no evidence as to how she’s arrived at any of her opinions, and at several junctures seemed to contradict earlier statements she’s made. And while she was altogether ready to critique the nation’s troubled schools, when she was asked if she had done any digging into them and was asked whether she’d sought to actually spend time in any, DeVos acknowledged, “I have not intentionally visited schools that are underperforming.”

“Maybe you should,” Stahl responded. Randy had plenty to work with.

Rippin’ with Rippon

Other than dating apps and a Sunday brunch to spill the tea about what happened last night, there isn’t a hotter thing in the gay world right now than Adam Rippon, who reveals here that he almost pushed the envelope a bit further with his Oscars outfit and that he’s apparently a hottie who likes him some hot wings. He does drop the F-Bomb here, so the faint of heart may wish not to click on the video below.

Loathe Star State?

A “Christian” pastor who happens to publish a small-town Texas newspaper decided unilaterally this week to remove a man’s husband from his mother-in-law’s obituary, citing “religious and ethical” reasons for the omission.

Brenda Light, 77, died after injuries sustained in a recent fall. Her garegivers? John Gambill and her son, Barry Giles, who have been a couple for 31 years. Gambill and his Mother-In-Law were very close, according to news accounts, and so including him in the obit seemed only approporiate.

The paper, The Olton Enterprise, received a tribute which read, “Those left to cherish her memory include her son, Barry Giles and his husband, John Gambill of Dallas.”

The paper expunged any mention of the couple. Once the pair contacted publisher Phillip Hamilton to inquire about the slight, Gambill asked simply, “Why was my name left out?’ And he said: ‘Because I wanted to.’ And that’s all there was to the conversation.”

Hamilton later opined to a Fox News outlet that “it is my religious conviction that a male cannot have a husband.”

He went a step beyond that in saying that “the newspaper respects the first amendment rights of those who express such opinions. The newspaper’s decision to edit the obituary is both ethical and lawful.”

Excuse us? Hamilton then twisted himself into a legal/religious pretzel by adding that “it would be unethical to publish a news item that is known by the editor to be false. Based on the truth found in the Word of God, I could not in good conscience identify Mr. Gambill as the husband of Mr. Giles.”

The couple is now seeking legal redress.