Politics & Public Opinion

Young Authoritarians on the March

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Well, one more post on the Creating Change travesty, because I think it encapsulates a seminal development on the left—including among younger LBTQ progressives—that older left-liberals haven’t wanted to face. It’s the fact that on college campuses progressivism now means shutting down or otherwise eliminating the expression of viewpoints that are not deemed sufficiently and correctly progressive. It’s a new streak of authoritarianism that reflects back to the pro-Soviet leftism of the ‘30s and ‘40s.

This is an ideology grounded in anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism, so it should really be no surprise to scratch the surface and find just underneath our old acquaintance, anti-Semitism, dolled up superficially as anti-Zionism.

The leaders of the National LGBTQ Task Force say they want all progressives to be able to come to their conferences as their true selves, but what happens when their true self is an authoritarian anti-Semite? At some point, “no enemies on the left” is just not viable, unless you’re willing to surrender to and henceforth take orders from the mob, as leftwing university administrators now appear willing to do.

Some are trying to defend the Task Force by claiming that the Israeli speakers at the Jerusalem Open House reception were the ones who decided to end the event because they didn’t want to deal with condemnation by the protesters. But that’s entirely disingenuous, as made clear by Washington Blade editor Keven Naff in his commentary Creating Shame: Anti-Israel protest misguided, offensive. He notes:

The organizers of Creating Change had to know something like this was brewing. Yet they had no control over the protest, which easily could have devolved into a dangerous situation. “The Task Force did very little to ensure that the program …could go on as planned, safely and without disruption,” [American University Law professor Tony] Varona reported. “Instead, the protestors were allowed to bully the speakers off the stage, and then to bully and harass the attendees out of the room.” When your invited speakers are forced to flee out a back door, you have failed in your responsibility to ensure the safety of attendees. Task Force staff must do a better job of providing security and of maintaining control over their own events. Ceding the stage to protesters sets an irresponsible precedent.

Naff concludes:

It’s refreshing to meet with younger LGBT advocates and Creating Change provides a safe space for them to share ideas and tactics. But “safe spaces” should refer to protecting the physical safety of attendees. They should not be shielded from opinions and ideas they find offensive. … Censoring speech and shouting down those we disagree with should not be on our agenda. Creating Change organizers must behave like the parent in the room and establish some basic rules of engagement and enforce them. And there’s clearly much work to be done in educating younger advocates on the history of Israel, the Holocaust and the plight of LGBT people in the Middle East.

Those who define themselves as on the left must either stand up to the new authoritarians or eventually surrender to them.

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The “Pinkwashing” Lie

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Mark Joseph Stern writes at Slate that The LGBTQ Left Has an Anti-Semitism Problem:

The concept of pinkwashing is extraordinarily insulting. It presumes that the Israeli government has no interest in promoting LGBTQ rights except to help mask its oppression of other groups. This presumption is totally unique to Israel. Nobody thought that France was attempting to distract from its terrible mistreatment of Roma immigrants when it legalized same-sex marriage. Nobody thought that South Africa was diverting attention from the painful, enduring remnants of apartheid when it gained marriage equality. Yet many LGBTQ activists freely impute to Israel a malign motive in expanding rights to sexual minorities.

More. This story has legs, and is leading to some interesting self-analysis by the LGBTQ left.

This includes a heartfelt letter to Task Force executive director Rea Carey that was co-signed by numerous (albeit overwhelmingly Jewish) LGBT activists and thought leaders, stating in part:

We also believe that the Task Force as well as all other LGBTQ organizations need to consider and adopt some form of an “active pluralism” policy with respect to these issues. Such a policy, while respecting the free speech rights of individuals and groups, would not allow protesters to effectively censor the speech of other groups, much less threaten the physical well-being and safety of those with whom they do not agree, including Jewish and Israeli LGBTQ groups. Given the concentrated and organized hostility that is so often displayed against Jewish and Israeli LGBTQ groups, and the stark rise in global anti-Semitism, it is even more important that we as a community promote civil and respectful debate.

A nice piece in the Washington Post by liberal Jonathan Capehart comments on video of the anti-Israeli protestors chanting,“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”

Writes Capehart, “Those words are alarming because Palestine can’t get ‘from the river to the sea’ without wiping the Jewish state off the map.” Well, that’s the idea.

At the Huffington Post, Dana Beyer, executive director of Gender Rights Maryland, blogs that:

The Creating Change conference is, like it or not, a business. Their customer base is now college students subsidized by their LGBTQ centers who are immersed in intersectionality, microaggressions and trigger warnings, and other forms of queer theory chic. One friend described it as students suffering from micro-aggressions getting macro-angry.

Beyer also quotes a letter to Carey from Tony Varona, a law professor at American University and former legal director for the Human Rights Campaign, in which he observes:

I’ve also found that the messages from the plenaries and sessions so far have been much more akin to the amorphous, sometimes incoherent “radical chic” anarchy-light demands of the Occupy movement than the much more substantive, productive, tangible resource-building messages of past Creating Changes, and as you might know, I’ve been to a bunch of Creating Changes since I was on staff at HRC (between ’97 and ’02).

I’ve heard much more about the abolition of prisons, police, borders and the state itself — really, the abolition of authority of any kind — at this Creating Change, than I have about grassroots lobbying and GOTV [get out the vote] work. In fact I’ve heard nothing of the latter. I’ve heard much more about who does not belong at Creating Change, who should be silenced, and who should be excluded from or pushed out of the tent, than I’ve heard about the importance of diversity and inclusion. Yet isn’t diversity, unity, inclusion, and conversation what Creating Change has long been about?

Many of the responses point to the problem of political intolerance (yes, “political correctness”) that’s come to dominate life on U.S. campuses of late. Students are indoctrinated into an ideology that justifies mob tactics to silence the expression of views deemed insufficiently progressive (and anyone else’s views are in constant danger of being declared by the mob to be insufficiently progressive).

Here’s hoping this self-examination on the left will lead to positive change.

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HRC for HRC

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The Human Rights Campaign’s endorsement of Hillary Rodham Clinton for president was no surprise, given the close ties between the lobby’s leaders and the Clintons. But coming before the first primaries, it was sure to tick off the Sandernistas, and indeed they felt the Bern.

“It’s understandable and consistent with the establishment organizations voting for the establishment candidate, but it’s an endorsement that cannot possibly be based on the facts and the record,” Sanders campaign spokesman Michael Briggs told the Washington Blade.

I preferred it when HRC just endorsed congressional candidates, prior to the group first presidential endorsement, that being Bill Clinton in 1992. Before then, the group could lay a claim to actual bipartisanship, supporting a fair number of socially inclusive Republicans. But once HRC tied itself so closely to Democratic presidential nominees, it was seen as the party’s outreach arm to lesbian and gay (and later, LGBT) voters. One reason the National Stonewall Democrats closed up shop is that its efforts were seen as redundant with HRC’s.

On a practical level, the early endorsement is viewed by many as bad tactics. Other lobbies on the left and the right make Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, respectively, compete fiercely for their support; HRC pretty much gives it away on the first date.

As Scott Shackford writes at reason.com:

[Many] perceive the HRC leadership as aspiring political operatives securing their own futures rather than actual LGBT activists and compromising so as not to harm their relationship with the Democratic Party elites.

The timing of the endorsement is itself evidence for the argument. … A look at poll averages right now showing Clinton vs. various Republican candidates and Sanders vs. various Republican candidates suggests it’s all extremely up in the air. Sanders does come out on top in some match-ups.

Shackford concludes:

For not a small number of people in the LGBT left, Sanders’ criticism of HRC will not hurt him at all and might actually help him get some primary votes, particularly among older, disaffected gay voters who remember both Clinton’s and the HRC’s histories.

As this blog has pointed out before, not rocking the Democratic Party establishment is HRC’s specialty. During the initial two years of the Obama administration when Democrats enjoyed filibuster-proof majorities in Congress, HRC failed to aggressively push, much less demand, that Democrats move forward with what was then its top agenda item, passage of the Employee Non-Discrimination Act. The bill was never moved out of committee, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (among others) didn’t want to spend the political capital.

The one big achievement of the session, repeal of the military’s don’t ask, don’t tell policy, lay dormant until just weeks before Congress was set to recess with a GOP majority slated to take over the House, when the grass-roots erupted and pushed congressional allies in both parties to force an end run around an again hesitant Reid, while HRC sat on the sidelines.

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Gov. Haley Infuriates Culture Warriors All-Round

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South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley delivered the GOP response to President Obama’s final State of the Union address Wednesday night. While Donald Trump and the trumpians took offense at her call for “welcoming properly vetted legal immigrants, regardless of their race or religion. Just like we have for centuries,” it was her other remarks on religion that riled up social conservatives and won her few friends among LGBT progressives.

Haley said of the GOP, “We would respect differences in modern families, but we would also insist on respect for religious liberty as a cornerstone of our democracy.”

For many of a libertarian-leaning disposition, and among a wide swath of political moderates, those remarks seem like common sense. But the response from other quarters was blistering. “Even the terminology ‘modern families’ evokes the ABC sitcom featuring a homosexual couple raising a child,” huffed Lifesite.com, while religious far right radio host Bryan Fischer ripped Haley for embracing “sodomy-based marriage and the entire homosexual agenda,” Right-Wing Watch relates.

But LGBT progressives aren’t likely to be won over. Right-Wing Watch, for instance, has complained that “framing opposition to LGBT equality, abortion and contraception as religious liberty issues is a core strategy of right-wing culture.”

Gay Republicans welcomed Haley’s remarks. “I was far more impressed by Gov. Nikki Haley and her call to ‘respect differences in modern families’ while at the same time balancing that respect with a concern for religious liberty—a position Log Cabin Republicans has long advocated,” said national Log Cabin Republicans President Gregory Angelo, quoted by PrideSource.com. “It was refreshing to see a Republican explicitly acknowledge that on a major national stage,” he added.

It’s not easy to defend religious liberty for private individuals, however, when religious conservatives insist on making the issue about government civil servants. As was widely reported, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis attended the State of the Union address as a guest of Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan. Davis spent a few nights behind bars for refusing to let anyone in the Rowan County clerk’s office issues marriage licenses to same-sex couples, citing her Christian beliefs.

As I’ve noted before, government officials are responsible for following the law of the land, even when doing so is at odds with their own religious beliefs. They are public servants, not private, self-employed service providers.

The religious right remains committed to government discrimination against gay people in general, and married same-sex couples in particular. The progressive left remains committed to using government to force independent business owners with faith-based objections to provide services to same-sex weddings, as no religious dissent against government coercion of the citizenry is tolerable. Authoritarians of left and right feed off each other in a symbiotic relationship that keeps the culture war roiling.

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The New Year and Beyond

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2015 was the year of marriage equality, a goal that brought together gays and lesbians from across the political spectrum. 2016 and beyond is likely to see a continuing divergence among collectivist progressives, live-and-let live moderates, and individual-rights libertarians.

In the presidential election, the GOP looks unlikely to nominate one of the candidates who can bring the party into the 21st century on LGBT issues. Whether limited-government gay voters pull the lever for Hillary, sit the election out, vote Libertarian, or go with the Republican nominee will depend on how bad the GOP candidate is on social issues, and how bad Hillary is on economic/government overreach and over-regulation. The result (most likely a Clinton presidency) isn’t likely to be good for the country.

The institutional LGBT advocacy establishment will push for The Equality Act, which will go nowhere. The act would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and expand that act’s definition of public accommodations to cover “any establishment that provides a good, service, or program” including “an individual…who is a provider of a good, service, or program.” Take, that, wedding planners, caterers and photographers!

Religious exceptions under The Equality Act would be limited to houses of worship, and perhaps only to ministerial positions, and the measure explicitly sidelines attempts to claim religious liberty rights by legislating that “The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 shall not provide a claim concerning, or a defense to a claim under, a covered title, or provide a basis for challenging the application or enforcement of a covered title.”

The Equity Act demonstrates that LGBT activists are no longer interested in any kind of a reasonable workplace anti-discrimination bill that might obtain the support of moderate conservatives and libertarians.

Transgender issues will continue to dominate LGBT discourse. There will be greater acceptance of transgender people as part of a diverse society, but if compromise is rejected over the issue of public restrooms and, especially, gender-discordant nudity in locker rooms, expect to see more backlash. Progressives will be mystified by this.

Political correctness, with all its authoritarian-left overtones, will continue to be the dogma coming out of the progressive universities and the liberal media establishment, and it will persist in producing push-back among many Americans who value freedom of speech and freedom of religion, including the right of citizens not be to compelled by the state to engage in expressive activity that violates religious belief. Progressives will continue to be contemptuous of such intransigence.

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GOP Trumped

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I fervently hope Donald Trump isn’t the GOP nominee, but it says a great deal about the state of the union that he so far seems unstoppable. Given the Democratic alternative, it’s a depressing campaign season indeed.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Aaron Zitner and Dante Chinni, in Donald Trump Forges New Blue-Collar Coalition Among Republicans (subscriber firewalled), shed some light on the predicament:

Mr. Trump’s appeal is a form of secular populism rarely seen in Republican primary races, and one he is pressing in part with appearances in working-class communities in Iowa that include independent voters and even Democrats who may be lured into the caucuses. …

Past nominating contests have often boiled down to two-person races in which an establishment-backed front-runner beats a socially conservative candidate who appeals to working-class voters—a role Rick Santorum filled in 2012, as did Mike Huckabee in 2008 and Pat Buchanan in 1996. Now, Mr. Trump appears to be opening a new, third lane in the GOP, drawing on a large share of voters who don’t have a college degree and don’t identify strongly with the party’s touchstone social issues, such as opposition to abortion rights and gay marriage.

That raises the prospect that the 2016 contest could narrow to a three-person race featuring the leading choice of social conservatives, the top pick of the party’s establishment wing of centrists and business-friendly Republicans—and Mr. Trump.

Gay-baiting isn’t among Trump’s fascistic tendencies. He is not a social conservative. He’s not much of an economic conservative, either. He favors the crony capitalism that made him rich. He is, instead, a populist demagogue.

What Trump will mean to the future configuration of the GOP is yet to be determined.

More. Via LCR:

Log Cabin Republicans remains committed to the eradication of radical Islamic extremism and believes it poses an existential threat to our culture and members of the LGBT community in particular, but inciting the politics of fear will not achieve those ends.

Plus this observation:

Considering Mr. Trump’s insistence that pursuit of a constitutional amendment banning marriage equality is futile as it would never be realized, we hope he likewise comprehends that his position advocating a carte-blanche ban on Muslim immigrants is equally fanciful.

As others have pointed out, on LGBT equality issues, Cruz and Rubio (among the main contenders) are far worse.

Meanwhile, how Hillary Clinton is bringing the nation together, as usual. Like Obama, her ire is most provoked by the one true enemy, Republicans.

OK, there is some justification if she were addressing Cruz, Carson and Huckabee, but no, not Bush, Kasich, Paul, Christie or (on Muslims) Rubio. Her partisan hyperbole is red meat for the base, and not what the country needs.

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Slandering DeMaoi Worked

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Via NBC-San Diego, DeMaio Accuser Sentenced for Obstructing Justice:

A former aide to Congressional candidate Carl DeMaio was sentenced to five years of probation Monday for using a phony email account to make it appear DeMaio or one of his associates threatened him.

The presiding judge said the slanders “definitely played a role” in DeMaio’s defeat.

LGBT progressives championed the (false) accusations that sunk Carl’s congressional campaign (he had been leading in the polls beforehand). I, however, was skeptical. As you may note, commenters on that thread were not.

Glenn Reynolds at instapundit: “I’m cynical enough to think that if he’d done this to a Democrat, he would have been punished more severely.”

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Hillary Tells a Tale

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Via BuzzFeed: There’s No Evidence In Clinton White House Documents For Clintons’ Story On Anti-Gay Law.

Yes, Republicans were/are worse—sometimes much, much worse—on marriage equality. That doesn’t mean we should excuse every attempt by the Clintons, Obama and others to make themselves look much more nobler than they were. Truth should mean something other than spin.

Scott Shackford has more. Hillary Clinton’s Bizarre Gay Marriage Revisionism Doesn’t Fool Those Who Remember. And he tweets: “There are now gay people semi-defending DOMA in order to protect Hillary and I honestly don’t know what to say.”

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The Progessive Campus Anti-Speech Movement

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There was a point, not so very long ago, when students and outside speakers advocating gay legal equality might not have been welcomed on campuses. That model of closed-mindedness isn’t something you might suppose those calling themselves “progressives” would aspire to emulate.

Later, when being gay was no longer anathema but support for same-sex marriage was a decidedly minority position (even on liberal campuses), discussions of marriage equality weren’t closed down. An open engage of conflicting ideas was viewed as central to a liberal education.

But today, progressives believe it is their responsibility to make sure no views outside their echo chamber, including conservative speakers and student op-eds, are permitted, lest they mislead those whose minds are not completely closed. Two cases in point, from Wesleyan University and at Williams College, expose the barely concealed authoritarianism that lurks behind much of progressive activism.

More. Feminist pioneer and committed leftist Germaine Greer is the wrong kind of feminist/leftist (not supportive of transgender rights). So:

While debate in a University should be encouraged, hosting a speaker with such problematic and hateful views towards marginalised and vulnerable groups is dangerous.

Brendan O’Neill responded:

The Cardiff censors say Greer’s ideas are ‘problematic’. That is what the PC say instead of ‘haram’.

Furthermore. The Williams student group that invited and then disinvited conservative author Suzanne Venker later reinvited her after being embarrassed over the fallout that followed their caving in to the student censors. At that point, Venker had apparently had enough and declined.

Late addition. Robby Soave writes at reason.com, citing Colorado College’s student newspaper, The Catalyst, that LGBT student activists at the college are demanding that the movie “Stonewall” is too offensive to be shown on campus by the college’s Film and Media Studies Department, which wanted to moderate a discussion about the controversy. Instead, they are demanding that the administration cancel the upcoming screening.

“I think Colorado College should cancel the screening because the safety and well-being of queer and trans students surpasses the importance of a critical discussion,” one student told The Catalyst. Said another: “If CC is really as dedicated to diversity and inclusion, they would never have agreed to screen a film that queer students have repeatedly stated is a threat to our identity and our safety. … It is fallacious to equate the rights of students to view a movie with the rights of students to exist free of violence.”

Soave comments regarding the students’ response to the film, directed by openly gay filmmaker Roland Emmerich, which positively depicts gay people fighting for equality in 1969:

That’s right: the film isn’t merely offensive to gay and trans students (despite having a truly gay-affirming message), it’s actively dangerous to their physical well-being…. This is a complaint emotionally-coddled students often make: that some kind of expression is so triggering that allowing it to proceed constitutes an act of violence. Such complaints are usually pure hyperbole, but hyperbole doesn’t even begin to cover the opinions of Colorado College’s precious snowflakes.

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A Good Fight

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Via National Journal: Group Aiming to Change GOP’s Anti-Gay-Marriage Platform Plank Expands:

American Unity Fund, a well-funded Republican group supporting same-sex marriage, is absorbing Young Conservatives for the Freedom to Marry’s effort to change the party platform.

Good luck to them, but:

Social conservatives, led by Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, are expected to staunchly oppose any changes to the party’s marriage platform.

Gay GOPers and their supporters may not succeed this time, but a generational change is underway, even in conservative circles.

That the pace of change on the right has slowed somewhat following the Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage is probably in response to the linkage of the right to marry with the denial of the rights of small businesses not to be forced to provide their services to same-sex weddings.

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