IGF CultureWatch

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."

HE CAME CLOSER than any other openly gay person in modern history to leading an entire country. He was smart, articulate, and charismatic as he defended gay equality against all enemies. In a just world, history would put him on a par with other courageous gay trailblazers like Harvey Milk.

But chances are you never heard of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn (pronounced "For-town") until he was recently assassinated, if then. And chances are what you heard was slanted and defamatory.

Fortuyn, 54, was running as the leader of his own party in Dutch parliamentary elections held on May 15. If his party had captured a sufficient number of seats he could have been the next Prime Minister of the Netherlands, the only country in the world that recognizes full-fledged gay marriage. But as he left a radio interview on May 6 he was shot dead.

Fortuyn was controversial. In a country with an extremely generous social welfare system, he argued for cutbacks in the bureaucracy. He wanted reforms in bloated and inefficient public services for education and health care. He criticized Dutch environmental policy as feel-good politics and as having "no more substance." He emphasized the need for law-and-order in a country that has the second-highest homicide rate in Western Europe.

At the same time, Fortuyn supported his country's tolerant social policies on matters like euthanasia, abortion, prostitution, and drug use. He made no apologies for being a gay man, nor, in the Netherlands, did he have to.

But Fortuyn also wanted to hold the line on immigration and for this he was demonized by legions of the politically correct. He worried that his country's liberal democratic values were under attack from an influx of immigrants, a disproportionate number of which have come from repressive and undemocratic Islamic countries.

Islamic clergy in the Netherlands have ridiculed homosexuals as "lower than pigs." Their attitudes toward the role and rights of women have been no less retrograde.

Fortuyn responded by calling Islam a "backward culture" in its attitude toward gays and women. "How can you respect a culture if the woman has to walk several steps behind her man, has to stay in the kitchen and keep her mouth shut?" he asked.

Candid remarks like that caused a stir. Fortuyn was denounced by political elites as an "extreme right-winger" and a racist. Just a day before his assassination, a writer for the New York Times accused him of "modernized fascism." These labels were ceaselessly applied to him by media in the U.S. and Europe even after he was dead. (By contrast, his assassin was described in the media as "an animal rights campaigner" and was remembered by friends in the Times as "a gentle and kind nature lover." Like many extreme environmental and "animal-rights" activists, the assassin apparently loved everything in nature except people.)

Was Fortuyn a racist? Hardly. He bitterly rejected comparisons between himself and the continent's true neo-fascist and racist, France's Jean-Marie Le Pen. As his successor for party leadership, Fortuyn chose a black immigrant from the Cape Verde Islands. Another party candidate is Moroccan-born.

As for his criticism of Islam, anti-gay views should not be exempt from criticism just because they spring from religious faith. Islam is backward when it comes to matters like basic human dignity for gay people. So are other religions, including many Christian sects. But it's worth noting there is not one predominantly Christian country in the world where homosexual acts are still punishable by death, as they are in Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia.

In his concerns about the ultimate impact of immigration on his country's institutions, Fortuyn probably exaggerated. The Netherlands already has among the most restrictive immigration policies in Europe, rejecting two of every three would-be immigrants. The American experience has been that wave after wave of immigrants, initially feared as having hostile values and alien religions, have enriched our country. As an American, I say open the floodgates to people who want to come here.

But if I were Dutch I might see immigration differently. A small nation of 16 million people, the Netherlands is already the second most densely populated country in the world. Almost 10 percent of the country's population is non-European, the highest rate in Western Europe. Rotterdam, the country's second-largest city, is now 45 percent foreign-born. Unlike Americans, the Dutch have a long history, culture, and language uniquely their own. Those things are surely worth preserving.

The most important thing Fortuyn did for gays, however, was simply to stand his own independent ground against vicious criticism. He proved a gay person could support free markets, individual liberty, a rollback in government bureaucracy, and tough anti-crime measures. He identified with the problems of hard-working, middle-class citizens. What's more, it appeared they increasingly identified with him.

Fortuyn refused to be shoved into a particular politics because of his sexual orientation. He defied standard expectations about what gays should think and say, and so made room for the rest of us to do likewise. It's not surprising the media was unable to compose a coherent or truthful sentence about him, unaccustomed as they are to seeing a gay person think for himself.

Some people are ennobled by their untimely deaths; when they are gone, we suddenly realize how much promise was lost. James Dean was not a great actor, but he might have been. John Kennedy was not a great president, but he could have been. Pim Fortuyn was not given the chance to show that a homosexual could be entrusted with the stewardship of his nation's most precious values, but he should have been.

Originally appeared May 15, 2002, in the Chicago Free Press.

THE AMERICAN NEWS MEDIA did a poor job of covering the assassination of openly gay Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn. They unthinkingly repeated the Progressive propaganda claim that he was a right-wing extremist despite the evidence of their own eyes.

Time Magazine called him a member of the "far right." The Associated Press called him a "far right leader" but later admitted he "never fit conveniently into the image of 'extreme right-winger.'" Not that that made them stop and think about what they were writing.

The New York Times referred to him as "maverick right wing populist" - as if that conveyed any meaning - and only later admitted that he "defended an eclectic mix of ideas of both the left and the right."

Perhaps the most incompetent labeling was by the Chicago Tribune which headlined, "Far-right leader killed" with a first paragraph that began "Maverick Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, rising star of the far right in Europe, ... "

Not until the 18th paragraph (if anyone bothered to read that far) did the Tribune's witless reporter deign to mention that "Fortuyn was not a traditional far-right politician ... With his bohemian attitudes, Fortuyn always seemed more in tune with the spirit of a modern, progressive Holland than many of the establishment politician...."

The Tribune continued: "Holland was the first country in Europe to legalize homosexual marriages, regulate prostitution, and permit the sale of marijuana in its famous 'cannabis cafes,' all of which Fortuyn supported."

So it turned out that the sort of "far right politician" Fortuyn was - was, well, "modern" and "progressive." But we mustn't let facts about his actual positions keep us from using stigmatizing labels, must we!

Fortuyn not only supported legal marijuana and prostitution and gay marriage, but right-to-die, reproductive choice and a host of other issues favored by the left. And, as Fortuyn repeatedly emphasized, even his controversial proposal to ban immigration was designed to protect Dutch liberal tolerance from being undermined by authoritarian Muslim immigrants with sexist and homophobic religious views.

So how useful are these labels "left" and "right," "progressive" and conservative"?

For instance: Is gay marriage progressive or conservative? Maybe it is progressive if you advocate it where it doesn't exist, but right-wing if you want to keep it where it does exist. So Dutch Muslims who oppose gay equality are Progressive since they advocate change? Or, if preserving gay marriage is conservative, what is the Dutch left-wing position on gay marriage? The same as the conservative? You see the problems.

• What positions count as "left" or "right"? Are we talking in temporal terms (change versus stasis) in which left and right depend on the political context, or are some issues inherently or necessarily left or right? E.g., is legal abortion always the progressive position?
• How can we accurately label someone who draws positions from both the left and right - e.g., gay marriage, legalized drugs and right-to-die, as well as lower taxes, reduced welfare and privatization of government functions? Which issues should be used for labeling purposes?

Either we have to rank the issues' importance according to some criterion or other and chose the most significant one(s) - or else we have to count up which side most of a person's positions are and use that. Neither seems satisfactory. What if they contradict?

• So: if "left" and "right" are not a very useful way to divide up policy positions, are there better conceptual models available? Are there some, unchanging root philosophical views that can give us a better insight into policy positions? I think there are.

Although Fortuyn was not quite a libertarian, his positions do seem rooted in a neo-liberal ethic of personal liberty, autonomy and accountability, opposing the right of the government to interfere in people's lives, or play favorites on "lifestyle" matters (like sexuality).

That suggests a consistency behind favoring legalized drugs, right to die and gay marriage as well as lower taxes and a reduced welfare state. Certainly governments reduce personal liberty if they take a lot of the money you spent time and effort to earn and give it to someone else to spend.

Someone like Fortuyn then functions as a sort of Rorschach inkblot. Most people looked at the aspect of personal liberty that is most threatening to their ideology to determine the label they applied to him.

Dutch evangelical Christian and Muslim fundamentalists - who opposed his positions on social issues - would presumably think of him as "left-wing." People who labeled him "right-wing," were "progressives" angered by Fortuyn's desire to cut back the extensive welfare state (including endless welfare for new immigrants).

In the end, Progressives seem more interested in redistributing income (called "economic democracy") and enlarging the government than in preserving personal and civil liberties. Conservatives are more interested in imposing restrictive social policies than in preserving economic liberties. When forced to choose, neither side's first agenda is liberty, but expanding control over people's lives.

Originally appeared May 13, 2002, on the author's website, BruceBawer.com.

Few political figures in recent years have been so widely misrepresented as Pim Fortuyn, who prior to his murder last Monday had been expected to win big in this week's Dutch elections. Fortuyn was almost universally characterized in the U.S. and European media as a paradox: a fascist bigot who sought to close his country's borders to Moslem immigrants but who was also, perversely enough, openly gay.

The image is outrageously unjust. Though his populist style might not have appealed to everyone, Fortuyn was no fascist but a democrat - a passionate believer in Western freedom, tolerance, and pluralism. His party leadership was a racial and ethnic mosaic; his death was mourned by Dutchmen from a broad range of religious and cultural backgrounds. His animus was not against Moslem immigrants themselves but against their often chilling prejudices, which he rightfully recognized as a threat to Dutch democracy. As for his homosexuality, far from being a weird incongruity, it was central to his politics: for his identity as a gay man made it impossible for him to ignore the seriousness of such threats.

Indeed, it is impossible to understand Fortuyn's politics without underscoring a vital fact: namely, that he was an openly gay man living in the only nation on earth where homosexuals enjoy absolutely equal rights - and, perhaps, the nation that offers homosexuals the world's highest degree of social acceptance. Dutch public schools teach children to view the sexes as equal and to regard sexual orientation as a matter of indifference. This is the culmination of a long and extraordinary tradition of Dutch liberty that predates - and that influenced - both the American and French revolutions. It is no coincidence that it was a Dutchman, Spinoza, who more than a century before those revolutions wrote that "the purpose of the state is really freedom."

Fortuyn cherished Dutch freedom - cherished it so much that he refused to close his eyes to the serious challenge it faced from forces within his country's growing Moslem community (which at present makes up about 7 percent of the Dutch population). For decades, Moslems had immigrated to the Netherlands in large numbers; but what resulted was not integration so much as the establishment of insular Islamic communities within Dutch society - including schools that imbued children with prejudices the Dutch thought their country had long since risen above. Within those communities, Fortuyn knew, were women (many of them Dutch-born) who were hardly freer than women under the Taliban. There were religious leaders who expressed anti-democratic views with increasing boldness - among them the imam of Rotterdam (Fortuyn's own city), who in May of last year publicly denounced homosexuality as a "damaging sickness." And then there were the Moslem youths in the town of Ede who took to the streets on September 11, 2001, to celebrate the terrorist attacks on America. Fortuyn knew that, given the higher Moslem birth rate and continued immigration, the percentage of Dutch residents who shared such sentiments could only grow.

What did such developments mean for the future of democracy in the Netherlands - which Descartes, as far back as the 17th century, had described as the only place on earth where one could find absolute liberty? What, for example, would happen to same-sex marriage - that triumph of Dutch liberal democracy - when fundamentalist Moslems gained enough power to eradicate it? After all, Islamic countries not only prohibit gay marriage: they execute people for sodomy. Fortuyn knew that if Dutch Moslems had their way, such punishments would be instituted in the Netherlands as well. Shouldn't any democracy that truly respected its gay citizens take such things seriously? Yet most Dutch politicians, for all their purported liberalism and their vocal proclamations of support for gay rights, would not go near such questions. Fortuyn took them by the horns. His doing so was not an act of intolerance, but an appalled and courageous reaction to intolerance in a country whose media and political establishment are typically silent on such issues.

Right-wing bigot? Hardly. On most issues, Fortuyn was far more liberal than anyone in the U.S. political mainstream. As for the issue of Islam and immigration, if it is honorably liberal to sound the alarm about male supremacism and hatred for homosexuals within fundamentalist Christian communities, why call someone a right-wing extremist bigot for taking these prejudices equally seriously when held by fundamentalist Moslems? Reading some recent misrepresentations of Fortuyn, one has the impression that journalists' consideration for the sensitivities of fundamentalist Moslems has far outweighed their regard for the very right of homosexuals to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Most Dutch people, however, seem to get it. The impact of Fortuyn's murder on his homeland can hardly be overstated. He voiced concerns that have long troubled his fellow Dutchmen - and others throughout western Europe - but that they didn't dare express. Those concerns cannot be silenced by a few bullets. Indeed, the European movement for immigration reform has only just begun. The new leader of Fortuyn's party, a black man whose parents immigrated from the Cape Verde Islands, may or may not take Fortuyn's place as head of the movement; we must only hope that whoever does will, like Fortuyn, be a genuine democrat and not a Le Pen or a Haider.

For the number-one political problem right now, in the Netherlands and across western Europe, is sorting out genuine racism from the desire to seriously address the challenges to democracy posed by many immigrants' religious beliefs, social prejudices, and political views. The longer these challenges endure without being given sincere attention, the higher an increase there will be in actual bigotry and cultural polarization. It was just such a future that Pim Fortuyn labored so energetically to avoid.