Originally appeared May 16, 2002, in the San Francisco Bay Times.
Just as musical silences can be as eloquent as any note struck, political silences can speak volumes. The silence of America's national gay organizations after the assassination of gay Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn is revealing. Let me summarize it this way: If you are gay and perceived to be on the political right, do not send to know for whom the bell tolls. It does not toll for thee.
Fortuyn, an outspoken defender of the rights of gays and women against intolerant Muslims who enjoy his country's public benefits while attacking its values, was widely and falsely characterized by news reports as a racist, right-wing extremist -- despite the racial diversity in his own party. Responding to media distortions is normally the stock in trade of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, yet in this prominent case GLAAD has had nothing to say.
The Human Rights Campaign has been quick to issue press releases and organize vigils when it connected the killings of gay people to a climate of hate. Yet now, when an openly gay candidate is murdered after being demonized by establishment politicians and journalists, HRC is silent. And the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, which considered the Persian Gulf War a vital gay issue, sees no relevance when a man who stood a good chance of becoming the world's first openly gay head of government is savagely cut down.
One explanation for this silence might be uncritical acceptance of stories that caricatured Fortuyn as just another fascist clone, despite his liberalism on many issues and his loathing for France's Jean-Marie Le Pen. But there is a more telling explanation. Pim's campaign was a nuisance because he highlighted the conflict between two cherished liberal values: the rights of gays and women on the one hand, and multiculturalism on the other. By criticizing Islam, he broke a taboo.
There is nothing progressive about refusing to distinguish cultures that persecute gays from those in which we have thrived. We are not supposed to notice that our rights have prospered in the capitalist, democratic West, because this would contradict the notion that all cultures are created equal. Never mind that the Islamists who hate us do not share this egalitarian view, but instead wish to impose Islam on the entire world. According to the left's double standard, any projection of Western values - even domestically - represents economic and cultural imperialism, while the most violent hate-mongering is overlooked if done in the name of the oppressed.
As Steven Emerson details in his book American Jihad, America's open society is being used against us by our enemies, who have only to couch their activities as religious or charitable or civil-rights related in order to operate with impunity. They are aided by a left that romanticizes Palestinians the way earlier radicals romanticized Ho Chi Minh.
This can have comical results. As Steve Miller of the Independent Gay Forum reports, a group calling itself Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism participated in a recent pro-Palestinian rally at UC Berkeley. A Palestinian objected, saying, "Gay people have no place in society, whether in Palestine or in the U.S." When someone took issue with him, he replied, "You are a cultural imperialist." Meanwhile, the only Middle Eastern country that respects gay rights, Israel, is condemned by queers for defending itself.
Freedom cannot last without preserving the social climate that nourishes it. Why should any country, much less one of 16 million people on a mere 16 thousand square miles, feel obliged to continue welcoming immigrants who refuse to embrace its values or its language? How is it unreasonable to oppose criminal gangs of immigrant youths? Dismissing such concerns as racist rather than considering their merits will not make them go away. And reacting to the murder of a democratic candidate as if he had it coming, simply because he had the temerity to challenge prevailing wisdom, is depraved.
Fittingly, Fortuyn is attacked from the right as well as the left. In a posting on The National Review's "The Corner" the day of Fortuyn's funeral, Rod Dreher called Pim a "libertine" and compared the West to Weimar Germany as a society endangered by moral decline. In fact, as a champion of personal responsibility, Pim opposed threats to liberty whether they were dressed in the censoriousness of the religious right or the nannyism of the socialist European mega-state.
The reaction to Pim's death in many quarters demonstrates how right he was about the bankruptcy of the political establishment. It is not Fortuyn, smeared posthumously as both a libertine and a fascist, who represents the decadence of the West, but the entrenched elites who are indignant at his challenge to their simplistic political categories. In death, Pim's invigorating voice has not been silenced. As I join my Dutch cousins in their grief for what has been taken from them, I recall the words of Walt Whitman:
"Here, coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac."