February 18, 2009

Blockbuster: Is the Radically Anti-Gay, Big-Time Prop-8-Donor Terry Caster Family Into Weed?

If you don’t know who the Terry Caster family is/are (or that they donated a staggering $693,000 to strip civil rights from gay and lesbian Californians), get a crash course from Fred Karger here, and then come back and read the rest of this post.

Ready? OK. So… I’m researching the Caster family for entry in the Proposition 8 donors database (yes, I’m still working on it, and yes, it’s very close to launch), and I stumble across the Caster family Web site. It’s a butt-ugly, horribly-designed site, but a treasure trove of information on the infamous Casters (all of which I’ll share with you when the Prop 8 database launches).

One thing I almost missed was a small, easily-overlooked link, labeled “test,” in the extreme bottom lefthand corner of the front page of Caster Family & Friends. Click it, and it leads to …/doc_locator/420doc.htm — a page with numerous un-linked banners for organizations (such as NORML) advocating access to and/or decriminalization of (medicinal and/or recreational) marijuana.

The working links on that page lead to various other pages containing information about marijuana laws — and one link leads directly to a site called 4:20 DocLocator, a directory of doctors who will (apparently) prescribe medicinal marijuana, and related organizations.

That any of the uber-conservative Casters would link to such a site is surprise enough in itself — but, wait — there’s more.

So, on a whim, I decide to look up the domain owner of 4:20 DocLocator. This is what I find…

Whois Record:

Domain Name………. 420doclocator.com
Creation Date…….. 2008-08-03
Registration Date…. 2008-08-03
Expiry Date………. 2009-08-03
Organisation Name…. VICTORIACASTER VICTORIACASTER
Organisation Address. PO BOX 227312
Organisation Address. Los Angeles
Organisation Address. 90022
Organisation Address. CA
Organisation Address. UNITED STATES

Is it a coincidence that the domain is owned by someone with the last name of Caster? I think not.

There is a “Vicki” Caster on the Caster family Web site, married to Richard “Dick” Caster, who owns the CASTERFANDF.NET domain name. (I’m not sure what the relationship between Dick and the rest of the Casters is; he’s probably Terry’s brother.)

So, the question is: Is the radically anti-gay Caster family pro-pot?!

Mind you, I’m very much in favor of decriminalizing marijuana, completely. (In fact, I’d like to see it regulated and sold as alcohol is.) So it’s fine by me if the whole darned Caster family spends all their time lying around baked to the gills and scarfing on raw cookie dough. Not that I’m saying they do, of course (although I would encourage just such a scenario, in the knowledge that it would mellow out the whole ornery whackjob family and make them a farkin’ lot easier to deal with).

The point is: How can a radically conservative, right-wing, Christian fundaloon family, or even one member of a radically conservative, right-wing, Christian fundaloon family — which wraps the cross in the American flag and then bludgeons gays to death with it, all the while screaming about the decline of “morality” — possibly justify marijuana usage, for any reason at all?

I’m guessing (guessing, I said) that someone in the Caster family is suffering a terminal or otherwise painful illness, and has discovered the (literal) blessing of marijuana. And I’m guessing that this Caster, or maybe even all the Casters, experienced a one-eighty in thinking about the Evil Demon Weed… in much the same way Republican Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter suddenly broke with the rest of the rabidly right-wing pack and became a fierce advocate of stem cell research — embryonic stem cell research — after he found out he had brain cancer.

Or like Nancy Reagan, who took up the stem-cell gauntlet in the final days of her husband’s long, cruel, and losing battle with Alzheimer’s disease.

Not that my heart doesn’t go out to Specter, and to Mrs. Reagan — and to whoever among the Casters might have been forced by circumstance to modify his or her views on medicinal marijuana — it does. (Really, it does. My daddy died a very slow death from the most cruel form of cancer, the pain and fear-filled horror of which would probably have been somewhat ameliorated by pot. I know that the long, slow, agonizing death of my beloved 37-year-old cousin was indeed eased — at least, while she was still able to function, before her breast cancer spread to her brain — by toking up.)

I can despise the gay-haters for what they’ve done to us, but at the end of the day, when we’re talking life-and-death, everything else goes out the window. (Yeah, bad mix of metaphors there; sorry.)

But I won’t hesitate to point out hypocrisy when I see it. And if what I believe about the Casters is true (and it’s only my deeply held belief, so all you Casters reading this can tell your lawyers to stand down), I can’t imagine any greater hypocrisy than this: A family of radical-right religionists who think they have the God-given authority to eliminate our right to marry — which was legal as established by judges (the majority of whom are Republicans, appointed by Republican governors) entrusted to uphold the law of the land the Casters claim to love so much — advocate, ever so furtively, for access to a controlled substance which is currently illegal.

The hypocrisy boggles the mind.

By the way: If you intend to click on any of the links on the Caster family Web site, I suggest you do it immediately — because when the Casters find out that somebody has connected them to the pro-marijuana movement, the incriminating little “test” link (and perhaps the domain record for the 4:20 site, if not the entire site itself) will probably disappear.

Posted by: Sapphocrat

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