Author Archives: Stephen H. Miller

Twixt Left and Right

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Hatefulness gussied up as moral superiority can be found among conservatives and progressives. Ideologues, one and all.

Bad anti-LGBT conservatives:

Bad LGBT leftists:

As others have pointed out, these “useful idiots” (in Lenin’s famed words) wouldn’t last long on the streets of Gaza City or Ramallah. But no one would care in Tel Aviv.

Gee, maybe these aren’t just “isolated incidents”?

Some sanity:

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Getting Woke?

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Pertinent points made by Frances S. Lee, a queer designer, trans baker and cultural studies scholar. Lee writes:

As a QTPOC (queer trans person of color), I have experienced discrimination and rejection due to who I am. … And yet, I reject QTPOC supremacy, the idea that QTPOCs or any other marginalized groups deserve to dominate society. The experience of oppression does not grant supremacy, in the same way that being a powerful colonizer does not. Justice will never look like supremacy. I wish for a new societal order that does not revolve around relations of power and domination.

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LGB and T: ‘Detransitioning’ Isn’t the same as becoming ex-gay

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Katie Herzog wrote an article for The Stranger titled The Detransitioners: They Were Transgender, Until They Weren’t, about “an emerging population of people who have transitioned to a different gender and then later transitioned back.” Then all hell broke lose.

It seems like much of the ferocity behind the attacks on Herzog’s article asserts that detransitioning is akin to becoming ex-gay. But this assumes transitioning as transgender is a close parallel to coming out as gay or lesbian. The studies Herzog cites and her interviews with detransitioners indicate that this isn’t the case.

I’ll leave aside the issue of “effeminate” gay or “masculine” lesbian pre- and post-adolescents who now increasingly are pressured to view themselves as transgender. Suffice to say that solid research has shown that many who experience gender dysphoria when young will grow up gay, lesbian or bisexual and feel comfortable as the gender they were assigned at birth.

Ironically, when an effeminate gay man (or boy) transitions as a woman (or girl), “she” typically takes on a heterosexual identity. By detransitioning, “he” reclaims a gay identity, thereby enraging trans activists, our LGBT+ “allies.”

On a related note, Taylor Fogarty writes that some trans activists are now disputing the definition of being gay itself:

Shannon Keating of Buzzfeed suggests we eliminate the word lesbian altogether, arguing: “Against the increasingly colorful backdrop of gender diversity, a binary label like ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ starts to feel somewhat stale and stodgy. When there are so many genders out there, is it closed-minded — or worse, harmful and exclusionary — if you identify with a label that implies you’re only attracted to one?” …

Riley J. Dennis…tells lesbians their “genital preferences are discriminatory,” since they only “prefer” vaginas, and “some women have penises.”

And finally:

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Changing Times

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Related, this study concludes that “Consequently, same-sex marriage and similar reforms come at no “welfare” cost to society at large—if anything, the opposite appears to hold. We further build on previous research showing positive effects of economic freedom on happiness and on tolerance towards gay people and interact our rights measure with economic freedom.”

Yes, there are pockets of “resistance,” but that’s always true with social advancements. The Texas decision won’t survive appeal to the federal courts.

Sometimes, of course, we’re our own worst enemy:


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Onward to the Supremes

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The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, about “whether applying Colorado’s public accommodations law to compel the petitioner to create expression that violates his sincerely held religious beliefs about marriage violates the free speech or free exercise clauses of the First Amendment.”



Not be be overlooked was the Supreme Court ruling in Paven v. Smith, summarily reversing the Arkansas Supreme Court, which had declined to order an amended birth certificate issued to a lesbian couple on the same terms on which the state would issue such a certificate for a child born via donor reproduction to an opposite-sex couple. Olson writes:

Notably, Gorsuch in his dissent took a legal technician’s cool tone that diverged sharply from what one might have expected from the late Justice Scalia: he refrained from zingers at the majority’s expense, stayed far away from culture-war implications, and emphasized that the dispute that might have been aired was over how best to implement Obergefell, not whether to retreat from it. Some voices on the traditionalist sidelines have urged the Court’s conservative wing to wage rhetorical war against Obergefell and Windsor so as to set up an eventual overruling of those decisions. But not a single justice took that approach today.

A new Pew survey, incidentally, confirms that opposition to legal recognition of same-sex marriage has extended its historic decline, and is now in a minority even among Republicans.

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LGBTQ+++ movement characterized by racism and transphobia, it seems

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The AP reports:

The recent flare-up of racial tensions comes as no surprise to Isaiah Wilson, director of external affairs for the National Black Justice Coalition, one of the few national groups focused specially on black LGBT rights. He said the broader LGBT-rights movement “has been whitewashed” — dominated to a large extent by white gay men. …

He said major LGBT-rights groups need to be frank in discussing the issue of racism, as well as recruiting and supporting nonwhite leaders.

In my experience in LGBT activism in the ’80s through the early ’90s, any person of color who walked through the door was implored to take a leadership position. As for “dominated to a large extent by white gay men,” women have dominated movement leadership from the mid-80s onward.

Diversity is vital, except when it’s not.
Jewish symbols makes some people feel unsafe, whereas Islamic symbols…oh, nevermind.

The Windy City Times reports that “Supporters added that American flags were similarly not welcome as they too are considered signs of oppression. However, flags from other nations were present.”

A bad sign.


A good sign.


Finally, Fred Litwin writes:

[Activist Tim] McCaskell claims that the issues of interest to young gay people, his so-called ‘new activists’ are “police racism, HIV criminalization, corporate power, the environment, acceptance of gender fluidity, Palestine solidarity, park sex, poverty, immigration and refugees, [and] youth empowerment.” …

Once again, McCaskell and his cohorts leave out the most important issue facing the gay community today. Our gay brothers and sisters around the globe face being tossed off of buildings in ISIS territory, being hanged in Iran and being harassed in Russia. Gay remembrances of the Pulse tragedy in Orlando rarely mention the Islamist ideology that fueled the terrorist bomber. Point that out and you’ll be called a pinkwashing homonationalist.

More. James Kirchick brings it home:

Jews are not only being made to feel unwelcome in left-leaning spaces, but anti-Semitism—masked as anti-Zionism—is becoming a marker of virtue. These episodes of ostracism are almost always undertaken to appease Muslims, which makes no sense under any circumstances, least of all for the LGBT community, which is welcomed and celebrated in the world’s only Jewish country and subject to state-sponsored harassment, imprisonment, and murder in nearly every Muslim-majority one.

It’s also cruelly ironic that Jews, of all people, would be subject to this sort of discrimination, given the disproportionate role they have played in LGBT politics and culture.

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