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?
GBLT - pronounced “giblets”.
More to the point, this GLTBQ tyranny is going to continue as long as they have blackmailable ‘conservatives’ to out.
I think they’re running out of them sooner than they planned for, hence the recent over-the-top campaign to grab as much as they can.
Tuesday is Soylent Queen day.
Khent: “F***ing fags, get back in the closet!”
One way for the gay community to achieve full equality is to stop trying to be something they are not. They will never be married, for instance; because that requires a man and a woman, and for society to uphold the special place for the procrative union, even if it means allowing some infertile couples in to maintain the form. But gay "marriage" involving children requires the participation of third and fourth parties; also, children never stop looking for and yearning for their "real" parents. Just ask any male-female adoptive family.
Oh suck it up ... that’s a perfectly good title.
You mean they sometimes treat their own activists the way they treat straight activists? I am for it - what’s good for their targest is good for them.
One long term mistake they made was adding “transgendered” to the list.
A man may see women with all the sexual appeal of a truck, that may be hardwired.
A man who says he’s a woman while still having sex with women violates that “it is all inborn sexual attraction”, by saying he has a female brain but is attracted sexually to women.
Likewise, instead of saying “we represent men who are men but prefer men”, they try to say there is no difference between men and women despite the really obvious anatomical ones, so who you have sex with doesn’t matter.
The problem is that the male/female dichotomy is true for 99.99% of the species, and the few biological accidents are mostly correctible.
Instead of saying “yeah, our sexual attractions are miswired, tolerate a solution of us with each other”, it becomes “male/female is a myth, so our sex lives are the same as yours”, when male plug to female connector is so simple, boy/girl binary so obvious, even toddlers get it - and they have to rationalize the heck out of things to try to say it isn’t obvious.
Good one.
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