Breitbart.com: gay self-respect equals 'fascism'

It takes a very special kind of pundit to capitalize on the fallout of the recent tragedy in Charleston, South Carolina as a way to attack gays, but it seems that John Nolte, Editor-at-Large for Breitbart.com, is up to the challenge.
In his June 23 diatribe (Take Down the Fascist, Anti-Christian Gay-Pride Flag), he makes all sorts of bold assertions that are intended to spook his readers into believing that a Homosexual Army is marching into their town to burn down their churches and supress any expression of the Christian faith. Listen carefully for the sound of pink jackboots, he implies. They're coming for you and your family, values and all!

The trouble with all this is that his bold assertions are backed by a very tenuous interpretation of the facts.

He writes:

Under this banner of hate, people are outed against their will, terrorized out of business merely for being Christian, bullied and harassed for thoughtcrimes; moreover, "hate crimes" are being manufactured to keep us divided, Christians are refused service, death threats are hurled, and Christianity is regularly smeared as hate speech.

Let's unpack the above paragraph and run it through my logic filter, such as it is.

Assertion 1: People are outed against their will

The person being "outed against their will" is Rep. Randy Boehning (pronounced the same as "boning"?), a North Dakota lawmaker who voted against an LGBT anti-discrimination bill. The complication is that while Boehning was a staunch conservative politician by day, at night he was cruising Grindr, a gay social networking site, and had sent a jpeg of his John Henry to Dustin Smith, a 23-year-old man who also frequented the site. In this Age of Anthony Weiner there is no excuse for any politician to assume any sort of right to privacy if they're sending pickle shots to men less than half their age, particularly those who make their living playing to a homophobic audience. Smith didn't "out" Boehning as gay - by participating in an online forum for gay men he outed himself, if inadvertently. Smith is guilty only of exposing a politician's hypocrisy, though evidently John Nolte doesn't get that nuance. 

Assertion 2: People are terrorized out of business merely for being Christian

This is a misnomer. Memories Pizza, a Christian-owned pizza parlor in Indiana, was the subject of a boycott and public shaming online and elsewhere not because the owners are Christian but because they said they'd refuse to knowingly do business with gay people. As far as I know, there is nothing in the New Testament exhorting Christian pizza peddlers to discriminate against prospective customers on the basis of sexuality. Furthermore, why is homosexuality the only 'grave sin' that restauranteurs seem to care about? When was the last time you ever heard of a restaurant refusing to serve murderers, adulterers, thieves, bearers of false witness, defrauders, or dishonorers of fathers and mothers?

It would seem to me that the conflating of gay discrimination with 'Christianity' is a case of theological acrobatics for the sake of legitimizing hatred. Sure, you can cherry-pick some homophobic passages out of the Bible - that doesn't make homophobia Christ-like. In fact, you could cherry-pick all sorts of nasty things out of the Bible that would make any self-described fundamentalist squirm with embarrassment.

Furthermore, while the owners of Memories Pizza are indeed Christians, and while the business is a privately-held concern, it exists to serve the public at large, and not just their fellow parishoners. To use supposedly-religious reasons for alienating certain segments of that public isn't just theologically-questionable - it's bad business, period.
 
As a Christian, I am offended by people turning Jesus into a corpse-puppet like the guy in Weekend at Bernie's, and reanimating Him without His consent to validate their hateful belief systems. I would feel at least marginally better if they had enough integrity to be honest and said "Alright, we just don't like gays, okay?", rather than bringing Jesus into it.

And finally, this particular situation isn't a case of 'terrorism' - it's a form of lobbying in the direct democracy known as a market-based economy. (As evidenced by the result this lobbying effort garnered, I would say this is a far more effective system than the symbolic 'democracy' we have in place in most first-world countries.) If the politician (restauranteur) is going to introduce some ugly policy ("we won't serve gays"), then concerned third parties (gay organizations) have the right to lobby fellow voters (the rest of us pizza consumers) not to vote (do business) with said politician (restauranteur).

Assertion 3: People are bullied and harassed for thoughtcrimes

Nolte backs this assertion with a situation kinda/sorta similar to the one above, albeit in reverse, where two openly-gay owners of a gay-friendly hotel, OUT NYC, came under fire from gay organizations for agreeing to host Ted Cruz at a New York event despite his known opposition to gay marriage.

While said hoteliers are free to engage in whatever political activities they choose, the clientele who would otherwise be their target market are free to publicly express their displeasure through any legal and peaceful means.

On a tangential note, the late Andrew Breitbart had an affinity for activities that Nolte would consider bullying and harassment if circumstances were different.

Stop thinking and start shouting! It's the Breitbart way.

Assertion 4: Moreover, "hate crimes" are being manufactured to keep us divided.

Nolte dredges up a few examples here where gays or transgendered people may have lied about being being victimized on a given occasion. Even if the reportage he cites is accurate, I say "big deal" with arms folded and a look of genuine disinterest.

Gay or transgendered people are just as prone to making stupid mistakes as the rest of us. (And in making false accusations, they're certainly far from alone.) The fact that they made these mistakes in the first place is not symptomatic of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Assertion 5: Christians are refused service

Again, anti-gay beliefs are being wrongly conflated with Christianity. In this case, someone asked a bakery for cake inscribed with "We do not support gay marriage", and the bakery refused that request. The bakery probably didn't give a hoot what the person's religion was - it was the message being requested that was at issue.

In keeping with the above trend, the bakery is free to exercise discretion in how it conducts itself, and in return it has to endure whatever economic custard-pies-in-the-face result from their actions. The freedom to make a potentially wrong decision is a beautiful thing.

Assertion 6: Death threats are being hurled

Okay, so some organizations working to delegitimize gay rights (or even label gayness itself as a 'personality disorder') have been receiving some threatening emails. Perhaps they were expecting truckloads of gays to show up at their door and give them prolonged back rubs out of sheer gratitude?

When you're in the business of bullying a certain segment of society, you can reasonably expect some push back, even if it's in the unjustifiable and inexcusable form of death threats. Grow up, already.

Assertion 7: Christianity is regularly smeared as hate speech

I don't know about you, but I'm getting oversimplification fatigue the further down the list I get. In Ann Curry's interview with Kirk Cameron, she was questioning him about certain things that he has said that could be construed as incitement to mistreat of gay people. (Cameron had called homosexuality "unnatural", and went on to say "it's detrimental, and ultimately destructive to so many of the foundations of civilization." At the very least, these are fightin' words.) Whether or not Curry's interpretation is correct, she has the right (and responsibility) as a journalist to question him on it. Asking a question, even a pointed one, is not the same thing as smearing.

And once again, Nolte's logic here is that if Christianity = gay discrimination, and gay discrimination = hate speech (in the eyes of progressives), then progressives must obviously be saying that Christianity = hate speech. There's a fallacious argument in this somewhere. False equivalence?

In conclusion, it seems that John Nolte would like Christians and conservatives alike to have the right to publicly demonize gays and gay rights, often in an outright belligerent manner, but not experience any resistance from the targets of these offensives. They want to get in the ring with the gay community, as long as the gay community has its hands tied behind its back. Nolte, for one, seems to want gays to know their place in the world and not deviate from it with talk of rights and equality, and is ready to pounce on them with terms like "Big Gay Hate Machine" and "fascists" whenever they dare stand up for themselves.

Nolte's frequent knee-jerk use of the term"fascist" is interesting in this case, because none of the examples noted above come anywhere close to resembling actual fascism. In at least some of the cases, they are a matter of gays or transgendered people exercising their own self-respect. (Yes, death threats and false accusations are always wrongful actions, but not fascistic.) So on that note I'll leave you with Lawrence W. Britt's "early warning signs of fascism", and you can ponder for yourself as to how many of them correspond with the Breitbart.com editorial agenda.

• Powerful and continuing nationalism
• Disdain for human rights
• Identification of enemies/scapegoats
• Supremacy of the military
• Controlled mass media
• Obsession with national security
• Religion and government are intertwined
• Corporate power is protected
• Labor power is suppressed
• Disdain for intellectuals and the arts
• Obsession with crime and punishment
• Rampant cronyism and corruption
• Fraudulent elections
• Rampant sexism

Political correctness doesn't equal anti-racism

Back in the 1990s, when 'political correctness' first appeared on our cultural radar, we were presented with a term that in my opinion went largely misunderstood, and would go on to become a near-meaningless flashpoint around which progressives and social conservatives could attempt to differentiate themselves from each other.

On one side, it provided social conservatives with terminology at which they could aim their seething contempt for the audacity of minority groups wishing to assert their civil rights or others who were addressing social injustice head-on. Perhaps these privileged white people felt their cultural hegemony being threatened, and their reflex was to gag by spitting the term 'political correctness' into their talk radio microphones with all the disgust they could muster.

And on the other side were the misguided souls who sincerely believed that by tightening up what we're allowed to say in public, we'd somehow usher in an Age of Aquarius of sorts by the sheer power of words. If we stop allowing racist or other retrograde forms of speech, the reasoning must have went, then we'll all advance another rung up the ladder of higher consciousness. Or something.

The problem with all of the above is that political correctness has never been the same thing as moral correctness. By its very definition, it is a conception of shallowness. A more intellectually-honest term to describe the same phenomenon would have been 'political expedience'. Think of it like this: if you condemn the use of racial slurs, then you can be excused from having to talk about root causes of racial inequality, and thus lull yourself into feeling like you've done your part and can move on to other things.

(As a side note, 'root causes' has now replaced 'political correctness' as the term of contempt for talk radio meanies, as it implies that allowing society to be a winner-take-all jungle a la Milton Friedman will not cure what ails us.)

Here's the thing - there has always been political correctness, though what is deemed politically correct is very fluid and subject to change from one age to another. For example, at one time there would have been nothing politically incorrect about segregation in the U.S., or anti-semitism in Germany, or the idea of wife-beating in almost any part of the world.

And while I don't condone the use of racial slurs in any form, it is foolish for people whose hearts are otherwise in the right place to allow their resistance to social injustice to be used up in squabbles over vocabulary. Furthermore, we as a society are kidding ourselves if we think racism is anything other than a very specific form of class conflict. Sometimes, this conflict can occur in an insidious form that goes undetected in those perpetrating it, and would offend them if they realized the import of their actions (or reactions).

I'm thinking quite specifically of the public reaction to the shooting death of Jane Creba on Boxing Day, 2005 in Toronto, Canada. I don't wish to denigrate her memory - after all, she was just an innocent 15-year-old girl out shopping downtown with her sister when she found herself in the crossfire of a gunfight and took the bullet that claimed her life. Creba certainly didn't deserve to die any more than the next person. In and of itself her death was an unqualified tragedy.

The public uproar and accelerated police response that followed, however, was offensive to me in the larger context of the wave of gang-related gun violence that had been sweeping the city that year. It seemed that hardly a day went by when the latest shooting death wasn't in the news, often a person of color whose only crime had been to be an innocent bystander in the proverbial wrong place at the wrong time. One such victim was a boy young enough to still be in diapers who, although surviving his wounds,was nearly castrated by the bullet that passed through his hip and into his genitals.

There was much hand-wringing at the time, but it seemed to be frequently punctuated with a vacant shrug of the shoulders. Perhaps it was just a gang problem in the black neighborhood surrounding the Jane and Finch intersection, and therefore allowed affluent suburbanites to consume the information with much detachment, as if it were some grim form of entertainment.

I found it more than a little galling, then, when the shooting death of a white girl from the suburbs while in the middle of an upscale shopping mecca triggered such a public rage for justice as well as an intensive police investigation dubbed Project Green Apple in honour of her favorite food. 

The poor blacks from the projects who died just as tragically in the same crime wave rated much lower concern from everyone involved. And so, even here in tolerant and diverse Canada, in our most cosmopolitan of cities, we are still capable of exercising segregation, at the subconscious level though it may be.

I'm sure many of the people who lavished indignation on Jane Creba's death wouldn't dream of using the N-word, and would sincerely bristle at the notion of having a racist bone in their body. The problem here is that racial inequality has precious little to do with mere choice of words

So, while President Obama's recent use of the N-word to illustrate the ongoing reality of racism despite the best efforts of our well-meaning public vocabulary could be considered politically incorrect, there was a sharp point to his words that no doubt was intended to prick our complacency and make us a little uncomfortable.

Although it may not have been a polite choice of words, these times call for some impoliteness as a moral imperative. And if one is to consider themself an 'anti-racist' in a truly meaningful sense,they should seriously consider the extent to which class struggle is at the heart of the matter, and how far they are willing to go for what they believe is just.

Duggar scandal has legitimate news value - get over it

While the Duggar sex abuse drama has played out so publicly over the past few weeks, some on the right (such as Sarah Palin) have cried foul over what they see as a media double-standard in the way that Lena Dunham's admission of sexually abusing her younger sister generated far less controversy when it was revealed last year.

This discrepancy in public condemnation, they reason, is evidence of a 'liberal media' plot to attack conservatives by targeting a family that, up until recently, had emobodied the conservative Christian family in the public imagination, even if they themselves are too extreme to be a truly representative sample. (To the best of my knowledge your typical Christian family doesn't approach their family size with that much theological machismo, nor do they normally run their homestead like a cult compound in full cultural lockdown. I could be wrong.)

Do the tighty-righties have a point? Does the glare of scandal surrounding Jim Bob, Michelle and their outsized litter of Duggarbots really signify some nefarious hatchet job on the part of a media hell-bent on bringing down anyone to the right of Che Guevara? Or is this complaint merely so much manufactured outrage at a journalism industry just doing its job?

To even begin to consider this, we need to first open a can of iced tea, have some dip, and look at this issue with a bit of emotional detachment. The topic of sexual abuse tends to get people all worked up, and rightfully so. However, to sublimate this worked-uppedness into compaints about a perceived political bias in the media is a little disingenuous, and ignores the reality that there is far more to the Duggar case than just the abuse acts themselves.

For starters, let's look at what Josh Duggar and Lena Dunham have in common vis-a-vis the transgressions in question:

• They have both admitted to sexually-abusing younger siblings.

Er, that's it.

Now let me say that an act of sex abuse in and of itself committed by a social conservative like Josh Duggar is no worse than one committed by someone more 'hip', like Lena Dunham. (The fact that Duggar has admitted to multiple victims doesn't absolve Dunham in any way for her lower victim count.)

As for what separates these two cases, let's get a list going:

• Josh Duggar was 14 when he is known to have sexually-abused his sisters, with some of them being much, much younger. Lena Dunham was seven. As I said above, all sex abuse should be condemned - however, a 14-year-old, particularly one raised in such a morally-upright environment as the Duggar compound, should know much better not to molest than someone half his age. For Sarah Palin to angrily call Dunham a pedophile seems desperate and politically self-serving.

• Lena Dunham hasn't held herself up as a paragon of sexual morality, nor has she ever accused any demographic of being prone to child molestation on the basis of their lifestyle, sexual orientation, or gender identity. Josh Duggar, on the other hand, was making a career out of it via his post as Executive Director of the Family Research Center, which has been notorious for continuing to perpetuate a study puporting to show causal links between homosexuality and child molestation. Problem is, this study has long been discredited.)

• Further to the above, Lena Dunham isn't from a decidedly political family that is using its reality show platform as a stealth way to bring pop culture recognizability (and hence validity) to themselves and, by association, their political, cultural and spiritual pursuits. (Yes, I can hear some of you saying that Dunham is using her platform to advance a liberal agenda. Even if this is true, however, there is a difference between advancing a mere political agenda and using that agenda to promote hatred of a given demographic. See the second-last paragraph below for more.)

• Lena Dunham didn't sue to keep her state's department of child services from further investigations by having files and testimony from the original police investigation (such as it was) kept sealed. Josh Duggar did just that in 2007.

• There is no evidence of a cover-up in the Lena Dunham case, other than she herself keeping her mouth shut until going public about it in her autobiography. On the other hand, there was indeed a cover-up on the Duggar compound potentially involving one local police officer (since convicted of child pornography) and a church community that apparently had full knowledge of the incidents but chose to stay silent. Personally, I think the Duggar cover-up was an attempt to protect the Arkansas political establishment in general, and Jim Bob's political fortunes in particular. I've already written about this, and have no desire to rehash it here other than to restate my view that the abuse itself is the source of the scandal, but not the true scandal itself.

That about covers it. In the most general sense, the Duggars exist in our pop culture for the purpose of showing the rest of us how we're supposed to live. On their TLC show, 19 Kids and Counting, they have presented a selective version of their reality, as is the case for any 'reality' show. Where this becomes problematic is in how they have parlayed their genuine on-camera likeability into political pursuits many of their viewers would find objectionable, such as Michelle's retrograde robocall to lobby voters to not support a city council resolution to allow trans people to use public washrooms consistent with their gender identity. In said robocall, Michelle warned that of course men in dresses would soon be preying on children in public washrooms unless something was done about it.

The controversy differential between Josh and Lena's respective acts of abuse would be galling if it weren't for the fact that the Duggars have set themselves up as moral authorities on sexuality, and in the process contributed to anti-gay and anti-trans bias by smearing both groups with the taint of child molestation, real or imagined. And in setting themselves up in such a way, they have set themselves up for a hard fall.

And for this reason, we can't blame the media for simply having a healthy sense of news judgement.