Culture & Identity

Diversity and Heresy

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Denise Young Smith, Apple’s first vice president of inclusion and diversity, is resigning from her position after less than a year. Smith’s announcement follows the response to comments she made during a panel discussion in October. As reported by Quartz:

When asked whether she would be focusing on any group of people, such as black women, in her efforts to create a more inclusive and diverse Apple, Young Smith says, “I focus on everyone.” She added: “Diversity is the human experience. I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT.”

Young Smith went on to add that “there can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blonde men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation.”

For the heresy of viewing life experience as being as central to a diverse workforce as is race, sexual orientation or gender identity, Young Smith (at the very least) felt pressured to resign.

And Democrats wonder how it could be that so much of the white working class has abandoned the party of progressivism.

More.

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A Sweeping Agenda

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Bawer also writes:

Stryker’s Facebook posts make a few things clear: she considers pretty much everybody who falls outside her comfort zone of “creative, intellectual, political queer folks” to be a Nazi, fascist, or white supremacist whose freedom of speech should be quashed. She has only contempt for the First Amendment. And she fully accepts the use of violence by her ideological confrères. One curious aspect of her politics is her repeated assertion that when she shuts down conservatives she’s crushing anti-Semitism. Can she sincerely believe that there’s more Jew-hatred today on the right than on the left? Or is she simply one of those leftists who prefer to close their eyes to some of the opinions held by their comrades-in-arms?

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In Memoriaum

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Playboy has been supportive of GLAAD, at least in the organization’s early days. I suppose GLAAD’s current leadership prefers Harvey Weinstein’s money.

Another view:


And from Camille Paglia:

More. From the religious conservative Calvinist International comes a reflection on Hefner that in many ways mirrors what the feminist-left says regarding objectification of women and all that (e.g., in porn “the body of the other is just a collection of holes within which you can find different forms of stimulation and release”), but adding in a critique of homosexual relations. And the essay notes:

In porn men can escape from the limitations that actual woman place upon the satisfaction of their sexual desire and get sexual release on their own libidinous terms.

Well, yes.

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Grievance Collection and Victim Portrayal

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He further writes:

Our attention is increasingly being diverted to so-called “intersectional” issues outside the shared realm of essential matters of LGBT equality or community-centric concerns – accompanied by the attendant presumption that sexual orientation conveys proscribed political perspectives. Moreover, this implies there is now a lot less on the “gay agenda” commanding group attention.

We witnessed this dichotomy last summer when “No Justice No Pride” radicals pilloried wholesale the LGBT community and local Pride celebrations in multiple cities for not protesting pipelines, prisons, police, and the lending policies of banks.

And he adds:

If we’re to expand our sights on issues of community concern, we are notably casting our gaze in the wrong direction.

Given that LGBT entrepreneurs and small-to-moderate-size enterprise owners and operators are widely estimated to represent fully 10 percent or more of our demographic cohort, much higher than that of the population as a whole, community leaders might better turn their attention toward issues of concern to those engaged in business.

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The Adoration of Chelsea Manning

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Writes James Kirchick:

More troubling than this fawning from avowed enemies of the American “security state” is Ms. Manning’s embrace by large swaths of the LGBT community. At the New York City Pride March in June, thousands cheered as Ms. Manning sat atop the American Civil Liberties Union float. While in prison, she had repeatedly been named honorary grand marshal of San Francisco’s gay pride celebration. She has also been the subject of constant, adulatory coverage in gay media.

Celebrating Chelsea Manning just a few years after gay and transgender people were permitted to serve openly in the military discredits the LGBT cause. Throughout most of the 20th century, homosexuality was associated with treason and used as a basis for purging gay people from government jobs, denying them security clearances and restricting their service in the armed forces. The decision by Ms. Manning’s defense team to argue that untreated gender dysphoria was a factor in her decision to leak classified information unwittingly aids those who say that LGBT people cannot be trusted in sensitive government jobs. And it dishonors the LGBT people who have served in the military throughout history without betraying their country.

More below:

And:

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Luxuriating in Victimhood

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A lesbian college professor writes about today’s LGBT-PC student culture:

A non-binary student critiques a faculty colleague of mine in class for using the term “drag queens” to describe the self-identified drag queens who resisted at Stonewall. My colleague, who is 35, queer, and teaching Sociology of Sexuality, is informed that this is an incorrect and insulting term.

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