Search Results for Stonewall

Mission Creep

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The Human Rights Campaign is promoting legislation requiring employers to provide paid sick leave to employees. HRC, in doing so, takes note that some employees without paid sick leave are LGBTQ.

The issue with HRC pursing a broadly progressive agenda is that when it fundraises among Republicans, it presents itself as a group focused on LGBTQ-rights advocacy. Yes, the Log Cabin Republicans support a broadly conservative GOP-driven agenda. They’ve got the name “Republican” upfront, and their mission is as much about lobbying support for Republicans as it is about lobbying Republican support for LGBTQ legal equality. The same was true, in reverse, with the now-defunct Stonewall Democrats.

But HRC was founded with a nonpartisan mission and for many years held to that in its congressional endorsements and fundraising (before it started supporting presidential candidates). If that had remained true, the Stonewall Democrats wouldn’t have been rendered redundant, and HRC would not have turned into an adjunct of the Democratic party.

More. From Equality California:

“Enacting gun safety reforms [sic] at the federal level is a top priority for Equality California. LGBTQ people and our allies are often the targets of bias-motivated gun violence.”

And since no LGBTQ people or allies use guns to defend themselves from hate crimes, no problem there.

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Gay Youth at Risk

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Quillette is one of the few outlets willing to address the issue of how radical transgender activism endangers gay and lesbian youth, in no small measure by promoting the idea that gender nonstereotypical behavior (“effeminate” boys/”masculine” girls) indicates not homosexual orientation but transgender identity, and that these kids should be placed on puberty blockers as the first step to transitioning into the other gender (after which, presumably, they can live heterosexual lives). That sounds a lot like conversion therapy except with surgical finality. And yet LGBTQ movement groups have made transgender theory and activism their new central mission, and woe to anyone who questions the new transgender orthodoxy. Helen Joyce delves into these risks in great depth in her article “The New Patriarchy: How Trans Radicalism Hurts Women, Children—and Trans People Themselves.” Here’s another excerpt from Helen Joyce’s article:
Some gay people think that organizations set up to fight for gay rights made a mistake in throwing their weight behind trans activism. In an open letter in the Times in October, some prominent gays and lesbians accuse Stonewall, Britain’s biggest LGBT charity, of “uncritically adopting a form of transgender politics which undermines…the concept of homosexuality itself.” (It added “T” for transgender to its “LGB” (lesbian, gay and bisexual) mission in 2015.) More than 7,000 people have now signed a petition in support of the letter. Yet Stonewall’s CEO, Ruth Hunt, has denied any need for a rethink, saying that “trans equality is at the heart of our mission for acceptance without exception.”

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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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Equality March: Separate Realities

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CNN reports:

Conservative gay Americans, for their part, view the march as a partisan event emphasizing “division far more than equality,” said Gregory T. Angelo, president of Log Cabin Republicans, a conservative LGBT group.

“For months now we’ve heard that Trump is going to ‘roll back’ advances made by the LGBT community, and time and again those rumors were proven to be unfounded,” he told CNN. “All of this chicken-littling has turned the self-styled ‘Resistance’ into little more than a hollow cliche.”

Gay rights activists, however, say Trump’s refusal to issue an official White House statement commemorating LGBT Pride Month — chosen by advocates to commemorate New York’s Stonewall uprising in 1969 — is symptomatic of the White House’s agenda for LGBT Americans. The march on Sunday will be an attempt to the let the Trump administration know that America’s LGBT community will not be ignored, they say.

Along similar lines:


Scott Shackford offers a reasoned assessment:

But Trump has notably not espoused antigay policy stances and has, in fact, resisted efforts to do so within his administration. So far, Trump is probably the most LGBT-friendly Republican president we’ve had.

That doesn’t mean that Trump supports the same policies that progressive LGBT leaders would like. That’s really the crux of the problem: Trump’s administration doesn’t want to use the federal government to advance anti-discrimination policies that cover LGBT people. His Department of Justice has withdrawn federal guidance ordering public schools to accommodate transgender students’ gender choices for bathrooms and other facilities.

Put in historical context, that’s a relatively mild decision, though it must feel awful for transgender students who are affected (and ultimately it may be decided by the courts, not Trump’s administration, anyway). Despite LGBT activists’ fears, the administration is not scaling back executive orders forbidding government contractors from engaging in LGBT discrimination. Life is still improving for LGBT people.

More.


Given the proximity of “Remember Pulse” and “F*ck Trump” signs at the Equality March, it’s as if Donald Trump, rather than homophobic jihadi Isalmism, was behind the Pulse nightclub massacre whose anniversary the March was helping to mark.

Added. The world as the LGBT left sees it: Via a commentary in The Advocate:

Trump quickly seized on the Pulse shooting in an attempt to further isolate Muslims and LGBTQ people from one another. … But the LGBTQ community never took the bait. Instead of broadbrush blaming of an entire religion for the act of one crazed individual, it locked arms with American Muslims in an incredible sign of unity.”

One crazed individual!

James Kirchick addresses this sort of response (in discussing Linda Sarsour’s Politics of Hate and the Pathos of Her Jewish Enablers) when he writes:

One sees this mentality at play in the ADL’s skirting the question of Islam entirely in its poll on European anti-Semitism, in the Obama administration’s repeated insistence that the people murdered at a Paris kosher supermarket by an avowed Islamist in 2015 were victims of a “random” assault on “a bunch of folks in a deli….”

More. Social conservatives are none too pleased.

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Pride Month Approaches

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June is Pride Month, and various cities and locales are facing a new wave of politically correct deplatforming and exclusion protests.

In Washington, D.C., organizers of D.C.’s annual Capital Pride Parade and Festival were pressed by a group called No Justice No Pride to ban police officers and corporate sponsors from the annual pride parade and events. The organizers stood their ground.


In Toronto, organizers went the other way and banned LGBT police from participating in their pride events, capitulating to Black Lives Matter activists.


D.C.’s Capital Pride did remove a volunteer event producer for expressing views they deemed offensive. Bryan Pruitt had posted an article last year at the conservative blog RedState that said government decrees and legislation regarding transgender bathroom use sought “to implement a solution in search of a problem. The City of Charlotte passes an unnecessary law and the State Legislature provides an equally overreaching response.”

On that point, if not on others, I would agree, so I guess my volunteer services would also be unwelcome.


And the demands keep coming….

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One-Party State Supporters

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Some on the LGBT progressive left are condemning the Human Rights Campaign for endorsing incumbent Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.). Kirk is one of an admittedly too-small number of GOP congressmembers working to make their party more LGBT supportive.

HRC’s policy is to endorse incumbents who are mostly if not 100% onboard with its scorecard priorities—even if an opponent dots more “i’s” and crosses more “t’s.” Otherwise, elected officials would have less reason to be responsive when lobbied—and in the Democratic party, there’s often a primary challenger claiming to be even more progressive across the spectrum than a sitting congressmember.

But as I never tire of pointing out (as it makes progressives stomp their feet so), the worst nightmare of the LGBT left is a Republican party that ceases to be predominantly anti-gay, pulling gay voters away from the party. So when HRC occasionally does the right thing and endorses a pro-gay-equality Republican incumbent, it’s seen as a betrayal. Left foot first; always, left foot first.

I don’t think these progressives actually believe the GOP can be permanently prevented from keeping or taking legislative power so why bother working to reform them. It’s more like if the GOP is allowed to have power in Washington, then worse is better as regards mobilizing LGBT votes and dollars to put the one-true-party back in office.

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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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More on Campus Anti-Speech Activism

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Since I raised the “Stonewall” movie fracas in the post below on transgender activism, I’m bumping up the following, which I had added to an earlier post on the progressive campus anti-speech movement.

Robby Soave writes at reason.com, citing Colorado College’s student newspaper, The Catalyst, that LGBT student activists at the college declared that the movie “Stonewall” was 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, the students demanded 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.

Also, here’s a link to James Kirchick’s piece on the Yale insanity:

If the administration is truly committed to equipping young people for the real world and not a chimerical fantasyland where they never have to hear something disagreeable, the best thing it could do, both for their sake and Yale’s sacred mission, is tell them to grow up.

And another fine piece by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic, The New Intolerance of Student Activism:

They see anything short of a confession of wrongdoing as unacceptable. In their view, one respects students by validating their subjective feelings. Notice that the student position allows no room for civil disagreement. Given this set of assumptions, perhaps it is no surprise that the students behave like bullies even as they see themselves as victims.

From FrontPageMag.com:

Crybullies are everything they claim to abhor. They are narcissists who complain about selfishness. Completely incapable of human empathy, they whine that no one cares about their feelings. They are prone to cowardly acts of violence, but demand safe spaces. They are bullies who say they’re bullied.

The crybully embodies the left. He is an oppressed oppressor. An abusive victim. A self-righteous hypocrite. A loudmouth censor. A civil rights activist who wants to take everyone’s rights away.

Much of that description also fits the heroes of progressivism who use the power of the state to force small, religiously conservative business owners to provide services to same-sex weddings, and destroy their businesses if they refuse (and threaten them with financial ruin, and jail). It’s all of a piece.

More. The Vice President of the University of Missouri Student Association, via MSNBC: “I personally am tired of hearing that First Amendment rights protect students when they are creating a hostile and unsafe learning environment.”

Progressive students are flooding out of the closet—as the authoritarians we’ve always known them to be. Their older mentors should be as honest about their intentions.

Fortunately, some students get it. Via the Harvard Law Record: Fascism at Yale. Yes, let’s call the progressive students’ political beliefs by its right name.

Proving the point: Amherst Activists Demand Re-Education for Students Who Celebrated Free Speech. A coalition of campus progressive groups declared that a poster celebrating the First Amendment was “racially insensitive” and requires “extensive training for racial and cultural competency.”

The list of signatories at Amherst includes Purple Pride, Pride Alliance, Queer Resource Center, and TransActive. Because, you know, what has free speech ever done for gay people.

Finally, Walter Olson’s Campus expression roundup for the week, at Overlaywered.com.

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Debating the “T”

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The Federalist looks at the increasingly uncomfortable amalgamation of LGB and T, by way of an interview with a gay man who posted a change.org petition to “drop the T.” It won’t happen, of course, but the interview raises some interesting points. The petitioner (he asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation from the trans movement) notes, for instance:

To me, the LGB movement, with its celebration of all types of gay men and women, such as bears, leather daddies, drag queens, diesel dykes, lipstick lesbians, etc., has always been about expanding and re-defining concepts of gender; the trans movement, on the other hand, appears to be about re-asserting and codifying traditional concepts of gender.

The initial discussion is about the Stonewall narrative, and interviewer David Marcus asks:

I was at the Stonewall twenty-fifth anniversary march in 1994, and at that time we all thought we had a pretty good idea of what had happened at Stonewall. The Stonewall veterans— mostly gay, white men—were viewed as heroic. In the new version of events, the gay, white men at the riot are presented as weak followers, not primary actors. Why do you think so many established gay outlets have so easily accepted this narrative that echoes some of the worst stereotypes about gay men?

To which the petitioner replies:

I think there’s a general desire to find heroes in the past that aren’t the usual white guy, and I understand that completely, as a gay kid looking to find gay heroes in a heteronormative history myself. But you can’t alter history to make you feel better, and doing so by twisting a narrative so that heroic men become weak, dithering non-actors in an event is disrespectful to them and ultimately to yourself.

More. David Marcus has more to say at The Federalist website, Gay Versus Trans Bar Fight Breaks Out Over ‘Stonewall’:

Consider the accounts of the white, gay men interviewed for an AARP video celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall. They are quite clear about what led them to riot. It wasn’t the actions of the small number of transvestites that led them to fight back. It was the actions of the police, the frustration of being left behind in a nation that was slowly embracing civil rights. It was the moment when they refused to be cowed by a culture that condemned the very essence of who they were.

Let us be clear that those who accuse “Stonewall,” the movie, of whitewashing and cis-washing the events of that night are calling these men liars.

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