The Rainbow Flag Isn’t Racist

Point:


Counterpoint:

Meanwhile, the Washington Blade reports that at the Equality March:

Javier Cifuentes, HRC’s Youth Ambassador, and Thomas Tonatiuh Lopez Jr. of the Indigenous Youth Council gave rousing speeches that captured the theme and tone of what leaders of the Equality March said was one of their key messages—that the LGBT rights movement must work in solidarity with the nation’s other progressive movements and social causes such as immigrant rights, racial justice, transgender rights, the rights of indigenous peoples, and women’s and reproductive rights.

Left-progressives only, please. So much for “unity.”

Equality March: Separate Realities


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 His Department of Justice has withdrawn federal guidance ordering public schools to accommodate transgender students’ gender choices for bathrooms and other facilities.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.

Marching in Lock Step

Organizers ban gay Trump supporters from North Carolina pride parade. Diversity!

And Scott Shackford writes:

Talbert has said he’s going to sue Charlotte Pride for discrimination, which is also a terrible response. Charlotte Pride should be allowed to include or exclude any participants it wants. It’s their parade. And there’s already a Supreme Court decision that affirms that parade organizers have the right to exclude participants with messages they do not support.

But Charlotte Pride’s organizers should remember something. That Supreme Court case was about a very long fight by LGBT groups to be included in St. Patrick’s Day parades. And they’re only just now, in this decade, convincing the Catholic organizers of those events to allow them in. To turn around and treat another group of gay people the same way is pretty terrible.


Meanwhile…
No doubt more “pinkwashing,” progressives will declare:

Los Angeles Pride Parade becomes Resist March—to foster inclusion.

Administration Pride Messages Get No Respect

More signs of the times where Republicans can’t gain any points with LGBT progressives no matter what they do.

This is typical of LGBT progressives, including the attack on Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who isn’t an opponent of LGBT protections or marriage equality. Still, declare implacable opposition to the GOP then lambaste Republicans for not being more solicitous.

Flashback: The claim that Pence favored conversion therapy is fake news.

More.

A World Apart

The New Yorker a few weeks back had an insightful profile of columnist and blogger Rod Dreher, a religious traditionalist who urges his fellow traditionalists to form their own communities of faith within but apart from the greater secular society.


Excerpt:

In the main, however, Christians have sought to make America itself one big Christian community. Dreher thinks that this effort, most recently associated with the religious right, has been a disastrous mistake—it has led Christians to worship the idol of politics instead of strengthening their own faith.

“I believe that politics in the Benedict Option should be localist,” he said. The idea was not to enter a monastery, exactly. But Christians should consider living in tight-knit, faith-centered communities, in the manner of Modern Orthodox Jews. They should follow rules and take vows. They should admit that the culture wars had been lost—same-sex marriage was the law of the land—and focus on their own spiritual lives. They should strive to make Christian life meaningfully different from life under high-tech, secular capitalism; they should take inspiration from Catholic dissidents under Communism, such as the Czech activist Václav Benda, who advocated the creation of a “parallel polis”—a society within a society. They should pray more often. Start their own schools. Move near their church. St. Benedict, Dreher said, didn’t try to “make Rome great again.” He tended his own garden, finding a way to live that served as “a sign of contradiction” to the declining world around him.

The article continues:

The writer Andrew Sullivan, who is gay and Catholic, is one of Dreher’s good friends. … Sullivan has a long-standing disagreement with Dreher over same-sex marriage, but he believes that the religiously devout should be permitted their dissent.

“There is simply no way for an orthodox Catholic to embrace same-sex marriage,” he said. “The attempt to conflate that with homophobia is a sign of the unthinking nature of some liberal responses to religion. I really don’t think that florists who don’t want to contaminate themselves with a gay wedding should in any way be compelled to do so. I think any gay person that wants them to do that is being an asshole, to be honest—an intolerant asshole. Rod forces you to understand what real pluralism is: actually accepting people with completely different world views than your own.”

The profile’s writer, Joshua Rothman, notes that Dreher:

…argues that “the question is not really ‘What are you conservative Christians prepared to tolerate?’ but actually ‘What are LGBTs and progressive allies prepared to tolerate?’ ” He wants them to be magnanimous in victory; to refrain from pressing their advantage. Essentially, he says to progressives: You’ve won. You wouldn’t sue Orthodox Jews or observant Muslims. Please don’t sue us, either.

A Hateful Choice, But Respect Free Speech

While I support demonstrating against a branch of the City University of New York (CUNY) for choosing as a commencement speaker Sharia law advocate and Palestinian terror-defender Linda Sarsour, demanding that she be disinvited plays into the hands of “progressive” opponents of free speech.

Aside from her advocacy for Sharia law, Sarsour, reports an Israeli news site:

is also an avowed anti-Zionist, having shared the stage with a terrorist murderer who killed two Jewish students in a supermarket bombing in Israel. Sarsour praised convicted PFLP terrorist Rasmea Odeh when the two addressed a left-wing conference in Chicago on April 2nd, saying she was “honored and privileged to be here in this space, and honored to be on this stage with Rasmea.”

While commencement speakers are overwhelmingly partisans on the left, and leftwing activists routinely and usually successfully demand that conservative commencement speakers be disinvited (or prevented from being heard due to the protestors’ loud chanting and other disruptive activities), nonleftists shouldn’t follow suit and demand that terror advocates supported by the left be likewise “deplatformed.” By all means, hold protests and boycott the event, but leave it to the left to demand limits on speech.

And no, the fact that Sarsour helped to organize the anti-Trump Women’s March in Washington and has been praised by former president Obama and other Democratic leaders in no way makes her acceptable. It just adds to the shame of the left.

(Jihad Watch takes on the skewed press coverage of the anti-Sarsour demonstration.)

By the way, leftwing defenders of Sharia law advocates might want to note that supposedly “moderate” Islamic Indonesia, in a province now under Sharia law, publically flogs men “guilty” of gay sex, with two men brutally “canned” 83 times last week. I guess the “moderate” part is that they weren’t thrown to their deaths from roofs.

More. This is not a parody. This is how you hear a great many progressives talk. They believe Christian conservatives who don’t want to be forced by the state to participate in same-sex weddings are worse—much, much, incomparably worse—then Sharia law advocates who would beat and executive homosexuals.

And then there’s this.

They Want the Feds to Make a List


More. I realize the data is meant to be reported in the aggregate with safeguards to ensure the anonymity of respondents. But of course the census forms are reported with respondents’ names/addresses, and you might think people would now be aware how unsecure protected government data actually is.

There’s a reason the census doesn’t ask about religion, and why religious minorities are quite content that it doesn’t.

Also, it’s not my contention that the information would be misused, but then I’m not among the hoard accusing the Trump administration of being a neo-Nazi regime supplicant to Vlad Putin and deserving an “F” on LGBT issues. No, that would be the left making those accusations—the same folks upset that the administration won’t be collecting information on the sexual orientation and gender identity of all U.S. residents.

A final thought: given the extreme likelihood that a lot of people would not want to share their minority-status sexual orientation with the government, the numbers reported in aggregate for LGB Americans would likely be even less than the 3.5% that many surveys show (with the T number far lower). And that would be helpful to us because….

(Election exit polling, where people are not contacted at their homes and so are completely anonymous, show a higher LGB figure, usually around 5 percent.)

Constitutionally, the census is meant to count the population in order to apportion electoral districts. Arguably, the civil rights statutes pushed the census to include race, so as to ensure that districts aren’t racially biased. All else is extraneous.