Posted on 05/26/2015 3:18:23 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
How will we win an LGBT civil rights bill if we can’t even talk to Ted Cruz?
The latest shaming and shunning LGBT morality play involves Ian Reisner and Mati Weiderpass —two rich gay hotel owners known mostly to the LGBT donor class—who co-hosted a dinner at their swanky Central Park penthouse last month for Tea Party darling Ted Cruz, the anti-gay senator from Texas and Republican presidential candidate. It was not a fundraiser, nor an endorsement, Weiderpass later insisted, but an opportunity to have a “dialogue” with one of the nation’s most powerful politicians about a range of issues, including Israel, Iran and, yes, LGBT issues.
The result: Cruz announced that he was now a “big tent Republican”—a phrase created by one of the most beloved and vicious Republicans of his time, Lee Atwater. But the two rich gays got smeared, boycotted and so torn apart that they issued apologies on Facebook for their “poor judgment,” making a mistake and hurting their gay friends.
Then Weiderpass reconsidered.
“Boycotting me for a discussion? Since when have we grown so small and intolerant?” he asked in a May 10 op-ed in The New York Observer.
Weiderpass raises a good and fair point, which should be mulled over as the LGBT community moves beyond marriage equality and tries to secure a full federal civil rights bill that provides job and housing protections, as well as swats down other forms of anti-LGBT discrimination. Indeed, sometimes it seems bashing and bullying people for venturing an inch or two beyond the accepted cool-guys groupthink of the day is an acceptable blood sport, with the most clever and vicious turn of phrase collecting the most likes and retweets. Of course, the critics see themselves as merely holding the offender accountable.
Viciousness in the gay community is nothing new. When Mart Crowley’s Boys in the Band came out in 1970, the straight world wondered how gay men could actually form a community. Gays, meanwhile, were stunned by the drunken viciousness of some of the lead characters.
The late San Francisco-based gay journalist Randy Shilts—now considered an icon—was heartily eviscerated for his position on closing gay bathhouses, opposition to outing prominent gays and naming gay organizations who refused to recognize the beginning of the AIDS crisis.
“If I criticize the gay community,” Shilts told late gay New York Times reporter Jeffrey Schmaltz in 1993, “then I’m part of the establishment. I sold out, rather than just having a different opinion. There’s no room in the gay community for people of good intention having different opinions. Either you have the opinion or you’re nothing. Yeah, it bothers me. People tell me, ‘Oh, you must love being controversial because you’ve done so many things that are.’ I hate it. My feelings get hurt.”
Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, hasn’t said publicly if his feelings have been hurt by the criticism of his tenure. Though some praised HRC’s choice of Griffin to replace the stained Joe Solmonese as head of the nation’s largest LGBT political organization, others have held a grudge against Griffin since he co-founded the Los Angeles-based American Foundation for Equal Rights and launched the federal challenge to Prop. 8 with Republican conservative Ted Olson. Though Griffin’s PR campaign to use the political odd couple to change American hearts and minds—especially those of Republican conservatives—helped move the polls significantly during the long Prop. 8 battle, Griffin was never forgiven for snubbing the legal groups that were plodding their way to marriage victory.
As a result, it seems, Griffin has chosen to speak directly and often with mainstream media while ignoring the LGBT media. Two months into his tenure, in August 2012, radio host and Huffington Post Gay Voices Editor-at-Large Michelangelo Signorile asked him about that. Griffin said, “I’m only two months on the job. I will be more available. I’m thrilled to be here [with Signorile] today and talking to you today, and I intend to do this a lot more.”
He hasn’t, which prompted Signorile to yell at Griffin outside the Supreme Court following oral arguments last month (pictured above). And while Griffin was invited to the cool marriage equality guys’ parties, he was spotted standing by himself in a corner with his communication strategist Fred Sainz.
The fear of a vicious bloody humiliation has prompted some thoughtful LGBT thinkers to self-censor rather than express an opinion that appears to go against whatever is the politically correct position of the most powerful. Requests for an on-the-record version of an off-the-record conversation challenging the status quo, for instance, is often met with qualms of being ostracized.
But without honest, respectful dialogue and divergent opinions, how can any movement progress? And how can the LGBT community achieve full equality without talking to and persuading anti-LGBT legislators to vote for the freedom side of history?
If the Supreme Court rules in favor of marriage equality—and gay Republican Fred Karger is convinced Justice Alito will make the vote 7-2—what LGBT leaders are standing by to move the fight forward in Congress? Who is crafting a coherent, unified national message? Or will the LGBT community assume a federal LGBT civil rights bill is automatically dead on arrival?
Who will the LGBT community listen to and accept as national leaders when the fight is over? Who will the community permit to talk to Ted Cruz?
Maybe they should now be called LGBTC(annibal.)
Unfortunate title.
The jokes to this title write themselves. This is a family friendly site, so I’ll refrain from posting them.
Anyone else notice that whole article centered around ‘feelings’ and not “facts”? Anyone notice ALL these kind of articles do that. Why, it’s almost like a plan...
Yeah, um....nope-not gonna be the first.
CC
per the headline...
PHRASING!!!! /ewww
There is similarities between the islamonazis & the homonazis...they don’t tolerate criticism.
-PJ
Ew. Thanks for the visual!
Now that’s a headline. LOL
Nope. Not me. Too easy.
It is with dismay that the "community" discovers that the most radical activists are in charge and will permit neither dissension nor lack of class solidarity. And they will enforce it with violence if necessary. Their ability to create a storm of outrage through social media has unleashed a very nasty monster indeed: a half dozen of them can simulate an army and there are no restrictions whatever on their doing so.
A little light will make the cockroaches scatter. They need to be identified and named, because once it is obvious how few and extreme they are, they lose their power of intimidation. That, or live in fear. It's the "community's" choice, not ours.
They don’t call it the velvet mafia for nothing.
The left, collectively, has no use for actual debate.
As for the “federal LGBT civil rights bill”, sorry fags, you’ll have to make due with the bill of rights like the rest of us.
Beloved and vicious?
You hear that Atwater coined the "big tent" phrase.
It doesn't make it true.
More here.
a phrase created by one of the most beloved and vicious Republicans of his time, Lee Atwater.
He was something of a genius. BTW, I post A LOT of Cruz threads and I don’t remember him calling himself a “big tent” Republican.
I usually see “Lavender Mafia.”
Sounds like the whole ‘outing’ Plame thing was a different kind of outing, doesn’t it? Right around the Craig and Foley outings.
I think “Lavender Mafia” is specific to the homosexual priests (and nuns) who have infiltrated the Catholic Church whilst “Velvet” is more general.
I didn’t realize that.
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