Bruce Bawer’s latest look at the warped world of LGBT academia, in this case CUNY’s Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS). Read it and weep for what kids in college are being taught.
More Academic Idiocy
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Bruce Bawer’s latest look at the warped world of LGBT academia, in this case CUNY’s Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS). Read it and weep for what kids in college are being taught.
20 Comments for “More Academic Idiocy”
posted by Tom Scharbach on
The thrust of Bawer’s article is that a number of gay and lesbian academics on the far left argue that gays and lesbians should look beyond the Israeli government’s support for LGBT rights, and take into consideration its policies toward Palestinians living in the occupied areas.
How is that different than gay and lesbian Republicans arguing that gays and lesbians should look beyond the Republican Party’s antipathy toward LGBT rights, and take into consideration the party’s economic and foreign policy positions?
And are the ideas expressed at the CLAGS conference really any crazier than the right wing’s hegemonic (Stephen may have coined the word, but it is too fabulous not to be put into frequent use on IGF) and unquestioning support for Israel’s policies, often motivated by religious conviction that Israel holds the key to Armageddon?
I have close ties with Israel. Members of my immediate family hold joint Israeli-American citizenship. I read Ha’aretz frequently, and keep up with the basics of Israeli politics, which are wonderfully complex.
I know, as Stephen probably does, too, that there is a lot of internal Israeli opposition to the conservative government’s policies with respect to Palestinians and West Bank settlement, as well as questioning about Israel’s polities among American Jews.
It is not necessary for every American to hold or espouse right-wing views about Israel, or to support Israel in all it does, right or wrong. A vigorous debate among Americans holding a variety of viewpoints is healthy, it seems to me.
posted by Houndentenor on
You linked us to a website with the tagline “Inside every liberal is a totalitarian waiting to screaming to get out!” Is that really any way of “forging a gay mainstream”? I didn’t bother to read any further. It’s easy enough to find someone who belongs to some group or other who has said something outrageous. It’s like claiming that Fred Phelps speaks for all of Christendom. It’s intellectually dishonest and reactionary and not worth my time. I’m sorry you hate liberals so, but this kind of irrational clinging to right-wing nuttery to avoid being associated with anyone moderate much less liberal is absurd.
posted by rz on
Where to you see that tag? What I found was “dedicated to the defense of free societies whose moral, cultural and economic foundations are under attack by enemies both secular and religious, at home and abroad.”
posted by Tom Scharbach on
Where to you see that tag?
It is integrated into the masthead, rz.
posted by Tom Scharbach on
What I found was “dedicated to the defense of free societies whose moral, cultural and economic foundations are under attack by enemies both secular and religious, at home and abroad.”
Yeah, well read the archives if you want to find out what Horowitz means by that:
The Daily Beast’s Disgraceful Interview With Bill Ayers
April 4, 2013
Thoughts On Learning That the Killer Kathy Boudin is a Professor at Columbia
Published April 3, 2013
Why We Were In Iraq
March 21, 2013
Why Israel Is the Victim
February 12, 2013
Defending Our Country
February 11, 2013
Reading Horowitz
February 5, 2013
The Feminist Assault on the Military
January 28, 2013
It’s the Message and Yes the Messengers — NOT the Voters
January 21, 2013
Neo-Communism Out of the Closet
January 17, 2013
Just scroll down the page and you’ll get enough of a taste for Horowitz. He loves to play the Nazi card.
posted by Tom Scharbach on
Oh, Houdentenor, don’t get excited about the slogan. The website is an extension of David Horowitz, who shares Ann Coulter’s flair for the outrageous and provocative. Its just a right-wing thing.
posted by JohnInCA on
Associating soemthing with Coulter doesn’t strike me as a good way to get it taken seriously.
posted by Houndentenor on
Right?
I’m here in academia. Music isn’t quite so full of leftist deconstructionist nonsense. (Don’t worry, we have our own brand of crazy.) We have to pretend like we don’t have a canon when talking to people in the humanities, but no one in their right mind thinks that the other classical period composers are the equal of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. That’s not PC. It’s just true. There was one nutty musicologist who tried to use Schubert’s use of third related keys as proof of his homosexuality (never mind that Liszt used them even more often and he never met a vag he didn’t like!). But overall no one takes most of those types seriously. They do provide fodder for the far right to act as if some ridiculous statement someone made somewhere or that some fringe group did or said represents anyone else. There is, was and always will be fringe groups. Giving them free publicity just encourages them. Of course I’ve been saying the same thing about Ann Coulter and her ilk for years (inspired by Jon Stewart who hasn’t mentioned her in a long time). They often do and say things just to piss off another group and it often works. Why give such people what they want. Are they anywhere near the levers of power? Do they have any real influence on policy or public opinion? If so, that’s worth discussing. But I find most of the time they are just an excuse to bash half the population as if that fringe group represented all liberals, all Christians, all academics, or what have you.
posted by Jorge on
Horowitz strikes me as much more of a stick in the mud than Coulter, and slightly more arch. If he called John Edwards an anti-gay slur, I’d think he meant it as an anti-gay slur.
posted by another steve on
In typical fashion, the progressive liberal-leftists and Democratic Party organizers that haunt this website have failed to deal with the substance of Bawer’s report. Bawer is one of the champions of a non-leftist, non-Party supplicant gay movement (author of the groundbreaking “A Place at the Table’). Horowitz is no Ann Coulter; his publication and website support gay rights and have run pieces championing gay marriage.
The CUNY conference was a travesty; what I read above is “no enemies on the left; no friends on the right.” Again.
Do you never tire? Is your one prime goal to come here day after day to attack any and all deviations from the correct party line? Apparently so!
posted by Houndentenor on
What would be the point? I have as little patience for the far left as I have for the far right. The difference between the two is that these sorts of leftists teach a seminar with 10 students while their counterparts on the far right run a political party. It’s a false equivalency. Yes, most of what they say is the height of absurdity. It’s also irrelevant. Now if I lived in Scandinavia, where some of this crap is actually taken seriously, I might have a view more like Bauer’s. In fact just last week I was accused of “racism” for criticizing some (certainly not all) feminists for refusing to criticize sexist practices in Muslim countries that they would most certainly criticize if a European or North American did them. How commentary on religion can make one “racist” when race and religion are two separate things I don’t know, but that bunch never make sense anyway which is why, at least in America, they are so irrelevant.
The problem is not the “deviations from the correct party line”. The problem is that like most “gay conservatives” Miller is not so much conservative as anti-liberal. I am happy to congratulate Republicans for supporting gay rights. I might even vote for one of them if such a creature existed in my neck of the woods. Meanwhile Republicans are given a pass for any anti-gay rhetoric. Again, a false equivalency. I believe everyone should be judged by the same standards. That gets me in hot water with the hypocrites and shills on both the left and the right. When you get attacked from both sets of extremists in the same week, you know you’re doing something right.
posted by Jorge on
CLAGS? What the heck is that? Drags in flamenco?
The thrust of Bawer’s article is that a number of gay and lesbian academics on the far left argue that gays and lesbians should look beyond the Israeli government’s support for LGBT rights, and take into consideration its policies toward Palestinians living in the occupied areas.
The amount of sanitizing you put into that would kill Mr. Clean.
Progressive academic ideologies that apply theories of oppression to highlight the ways in which oppressed minorities align themselves with other identities of power will always have something worthwhile to say.
Where they falter is the boomerang. As you start exploring the theory of oppression in real time, sooner or later it will start to apply to whitey. That realization always beheads progressive intellectual numbskulls. So they compensate by making the theory more complicated. There’s the homophobia and anti-semitism separately affecting one person (I misuse the latter term deliberately because I do not accept the term Zionism to mean racism). Then there’s the study of the interaction between the two. Then you have to give it a fancy name.
Over and over again, the result is inescapable that whitey is being victimized, so they start adding so many wrinkles to what oppression is that the boomergang keeps cutting their heads off faster and faster. Because the more special categories you try to create for “even more oppressed” people, the more oppressed people you’re leaving behind in the whitey category, and the whole house of cards falls.
That’s why I’m not a progressive. The only way to apply progressive theories of oppression consistently is to apply them (and their allied movements) with empathy and cultural sensitivity toward the experience of the white man.
posted by Tom Scharbach on
Tom: The thrust of Bawer’s article is that a number of gay and lesbian academics on the far left argue that gays and lesbians should look beyond the Israeli government’s support for LGBT rights, and take into consideration its policies toward Palestinians living in the occupied areas.
Jorge: The amount of sanitizing you put into that would kill Mr. Clean.
In response, I can only quote Bawer:
I never heard of CLAGS until I read the article, and I doubt very many other people, outside of a small, far-left group of gay and lesbian academics, are even aware that CLAGS exists.
Bawer, to my mind, is making a mountain out of a molehill. Stephen (“Read it and weep for what kids in college are being taught.“) almost certainly is … For God’s sake.
posted by Jorge on
In response, I can only quote Bawer:
The thrust of Schulman’s op-ed was that gays and others should look past Israel’s gay-friendly image (which, she claimed, is the product of an intentional Israeli effort to bolster support abroad), focus on the terrible suffering of Palestinian Muslims at the merciless hands of the Israelis …
Like I said. The amount of sanitizing you put into that would kill Mr. Clean. Here are some more relevant quotes:
veteran far-left Jewish lesbian activist Sarah Schulman wrote an op-ed in which she introduced New York Times readers to a couple of unfamiliar terms. One was “pinkwashing,” which she defined as “a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life.” The other was “homonationalism”: the alleged tendency of gays who’ve won social acceptance and legal rights to identify with “the racial and religious hegemony of their countries,” and to “construct the ‘other,’ often Muslims of Arab, South Asian, Turkish, or African origin, as ‘homophobic’ and fanatically heterosexual.”
…
She derided a request that she include “a keynote speaker from the other side,” adding (to uproarious applause): “Like there’s two sides!”
…
Palestinian lesbian and “world-class visionary” Haneen Maikey argued that “focusing on Western concepts of LGBT” (which involve such trivial matters as freedom and equal rights) distracts from the “central issue” of Palestine. As for the argument that Israel accepts gays and Palestinian authorities don’t, Maikey said that it’s vital to reject this “binary” and to pay more attention to nuance.
…
She dismissed the argument that there are good and bad Israelis and good and bad Palestinians. No, she thundered: “There’s a colonizer and a colonized!”
…
In one particularly loathsome session, entitled “LGBT Rescue Narratives,” the speakers mocked the idea that for gays the Muslim world is a dangerous place and the West a sanctuary.
…
Another session, “Pinkwashing Beyond the LGBT,” illustrated that “pinkwashing” has been quick to spawn ideological offshoots. . . . Apparently, anything good about Israel that happens to be mentioned in the international media can be denounced as this or that kind of “washing.”
This sort of extremism twists your “look beyond/take into consideration” into an imperative, rather, to wake up and smell the coffee what’s right in front of you.
posted by TomJeffersonIII on
–The CUNY conference
Oh, so this was not something that ALL LGBT students were exposed to? Only something that some people could choose to go to if they liked what the speakers said (or wanted to rant and rave about how evil they were). Hmmm….
Israel does have a progressive policy on LGBT rights and that should be supported (by anyone who believes in universal human rights and dignity). That does not mean that things are magical for gay people in Israel or that we must agree with everything that the Israeli government does.
posted by Jorge on
Nobody is arguing that.
But just because an interesting idea is not in political favor does not mean we have to give respectability to people who are so arrogant and whiney in their denunciations against their own lack of political favor that they completely twist the fact around.
posted by Houndentenor on
Yes, actually people argue that all the time in our country. I can think of any number of people who were accused of antisemitism for daring to criticize any Israeli policy. (Andrew Sullivan, Chuck Hagel, etc.) I am a supporter of Israel (and get grief all the time from my liberal and leftist friends for my positions) but I’m not going to give anyone a free pass. We live in ridiculous times where people will take the opposite position of whoever they are “against” even if the position that forces them into is absurd. It often makes for some sad moments when otherwise bright people have to defend the indefensible. (Ex. In 1996 Bob Dole was trying to defend the idea that we aren’t sure that tobacco causes cancer. He knew better and I felt sorry for him being painted into such a ridiculous corner by the political landscape.)
posted by Jorge on
Yes, actually people argue that all the time in our country
Tom was making a statement in response to Mr. Miller’s post and Mr. Bawer’s article (and possibly other comments here). Let’s limit the discussion to that. Stay on topic.
Nobody is arguing that.
posted by Throbert McGee on
Possibly. But I can also think of people who were accused of antisemitism for “daring” to suggest that Israeli settlement policies (for example) represented a larger program of intentional genocide against the Palestinians, or “daring” to tilt their heads sadly to one side and point out how ironic it is that the victims of Nazi oppression have morphed into Nazi-esque oppressors, and so forth. In short, they were accused of antisemitism because their “criticism” of Israel was grotesquely over-the-top.
More generally (i.e., not only in the Israel/Palestine context) when someone uses the phrase “my side has been unfairly attacked for daring to make the teeny-tiniest little criticism of any sort against so-and-so,” what I hear is the bleating of a duplicitious asshole who’s been called out for making outrageous slanders, and is pathetically trying to spin himself as a martyred Speaker Of Truths.
posted by TomJeffersonIII on
—But I can also think of people who were accused of antisemitism for “daring” to suggest that Israeli settlement policies (for example) represented a larger program of intentional genocide against the Palestinians.
I am not sure that such a statement would qualify as ‘anti-Semitism’. I do not think its a terribly accurate or (in terms of the peace pr0cess) helpful (I am opposed to the settlement policy), but I am not clear how this would equal anti-Semitism.
–or “daring” to tilt their heads sadly to one side and point out how ironic it is that the victims of Nazi oppression have morphed into Nazi-esque oppressors
This is another argument that I have heard. Its a stupid and entirely counter productive one to make. Yet, I am not entirely sure that these grotesquely over-the-top would equal anti-Semitism per se.
Yes, I would agree — to a point — that we do certainly see ‘pro Palestinian’ factions who make these sort of grotesquely over-the-top, as well as other, more overtly anti-Semitic/anti-Jewish comments.
I would also say that I had a fair number of ‘Pro Israeli’ folk do similar things, except the over-the-topness and prejudice-to-justify-injustice is directed at Arabs or Palestinians or Muslims.
This is why I do not like being put into the ‘pro-Israeli’ or ‘Pro-Palestinian’ boxes. I support the right of Israel to exist and to defend itself (just as any nation). I support its progressive polices, when they are in fact progressive. I also believe that their is unfair discrimination within Israel against Arab/Muslims. I also believe that the Israel settlement policy is immoral. I also believe that Palestinian people — like Israeli people — should be able to benefit from progressive policies and a transparent, fair, democratic government….Not sure what sound byte/bumper sticker slogan that is.