LGBT Tribalism and Orthodoxy

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As I noted in an update to the prior post, Chad Felix Greene has penned a thoughtful essay at HuffPost on LGBT political orthodoxy that’s well worth reading, I’m Gay, But I’m Not ‘LGBT.’ Here’s Why. A few excerpts follow:

The LGBT movement has always been tribal, but until fairly recently it was defined by its great diversity of ideas and ferocious demands for celebrated individuality. …

Cultures either evolve or they become ferociously tribal. The left in the last decade has encouraged tribalism in all minority groups, rejecting cohesive assimilation at any cost. In the wake of equality and social normalcy, the LGBTQIAP+ movement has chosen to follow this path. Unfortunately this has created an almost cult-like environment.

Gays today live with so much freedom, equality and social acceptance the worst thing they seem to imagine is a Christian might hesitate when asked to write ‘Support Gay Marriage’ on their wedding cake. This is what happens when society changes so quickly. … Teenagers fighting for recognition of their identity and causing controversy for taking their same-sex date to prom went to college and learned about advocacy. … But by the time they got old enough to be in charge, all the injustices were gone – but the passion and the narrative remained. Today we have an entire generation of gay people in their 30’s who have not left high school in their minds. They are still fighting Ellen’s 1996 battle. … They are still arguing against Falwell and raging against Reagan. Still trying to prove homosexuality isn’t a choice or sinful. …

Where once the gay movement defined itself by open and welcoming love and support for everyone, including non-gay people, today one can be exiled for dissent. As I have written about for years now, the gay left has become absolute in its authoritarian approach to what is appropriate to believe as a gay person. Where it was once fairly understandable to question why a gay person would be a Republican, today there is actual hatred directed towards individuals perceived as traitors for choosing this affiliation. The gay movement once defined itself as almost ridiculously diverse. Today it holds a single political affiliation: LGBT are Democrats. There are no other options. Even non-conservative alternative parities are targeted.

And they’ll never see the irony of declaring themselves champions of diversity and enemies of intolerance.

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Poll: Gay Voters for Trump

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As I’ve noted before, I am not a Donald Trump supporter, finding him unfit by dint of his positions on immigration, trade and civil liberties, as well as due to his hair-trigger personality. I am also not a Hillary Clinton supporter, given her long history of corruption and dishonesty, and her awful positions on taxes, spending and regulation. [Not to mention her rolling foreign policy disasters as Sec’y of State.]

That said, if there’s one thing good about Trump, it’s that as the GOP presidential nominee he has reached out to, as he puts it, “LGBTQ” Americans. In response, the LGBT political activists who are basically an auxiliary of the Democrat party, and LGBT media of which the same is true, have promoted the lie that Trump is anti-gay.

I think it’s a good thing for gay people who find Trump’s politics and personality acceptable to be supporting him. The Washington Post reports that:

If the only gay voices you hear are Trump foes and Clinton boosters…you could easily assume that all LGBT voters are in the Democratic presidential nominee’s camp. Well, think again. A Gallup poll released Wednesday reports that 12 percent of LGBT adults view Republican nominee Donald Trump favorably. Granted, that’s compared with the 55 percent who have a positive view of Clinton, but it’s still a surprising number. Even more eyebrow-raising, the poll found that fully 21 percent of older (55+) LGBT people gave Trump a favorable rating.

That’s a 12% favorable rating; the actual gay vote for Trump is likely to be much larger.

[Update: According to Reuters polling: while in March Trump had just 13.5% support from LGBT voters, in May LGBT support rose to 18.3%. Trump’s numbers took a slight dip in June before rising to 23% in late July. However, a New York Times exit poll put LGBT votes for Trump on election day at 14%.]

The newsite buzzfeed joins the fray with a post that’s dismissively headlined Donald Trump’s Top “LGBT” Supporters Are Largely Gay White Men. The story notes that:

On Sunday night in Greeley, Colorado, Donald Trump spotted something he wanted in the crowd. He gestured to a supporter, who handed a wad of rainbow fabric up to the stage. Trump unfurled it for the fans and cameras — a pride flag scrawled with the words “LGBTs for Trump.” He strutted stage left, grinning and nodding to the audience with a literal sign of his diverse support.

Despite buzzfeed’s snark, it’s a startling photo of the likes we’ve never seen from a GOP presidential nominee, and shows why Trump’s gay support isn’t crazy.

More. Commenters have pointed to Chad Felix Greene’s deeply thoughtful essay at HuffPost, I’m Gay, But I’m Not ‘LGBT.’ Here’s Why. It’s long but well worth reading. Toward the end he addresses what has now become the Trump flag controversy:

#GaysforTrump supporters handed Donald Trump a rainbow flag they had written a supportive slogan on at an event which he held up for the cameras. The act was completely mundane in that Trump has never been hostile towards gays and he tends to be enthusiastic about all of his supporters, often showing open public support for them. Trump holding the flag was simple, it wasn’t staged, and it wasn’t a planned photo-op at a gay event to pander. It also wasn’t done with political biting-of-the-tongue because he had to. Trump was handed the flag by supporters and he did what he always does, he held it up and smiled.

Zack Ford, the LGBT editor for ThinkProgress.org, tweeted that “Putting a slogan on a flag is considered desecration. Also, the flag was upside down (red goes on top). What am I supposed to respect here?”

To which Greene responded:

The LGBT media instantly pounced on the idea that the flag was ‘upside down’ and Ford ranted endlessly, clutching multiple strands of pearls at once, about ‘desecration’ of what is now, apparently, a sacred flag. This is cult-like behavior. Its tribalism. The flag is usually presented with the red stripe at the top but there has never been a question of a correct side. The notion it is being held ‘upside down’, especially with the implication given to say an upside down cross, is nonsense. Gay people wrote on the flag, it wasn’t desecrated. I find the sudden treatment of this symbol as holy disturbing.

Indeed. Some might even say it’s crazy.

Furthermore. Trump’s holding up of the gay flag happened last Sunday. Not a word about it in the following Friday’s weekly Washington Blade, the strongly pro-Clinton LGBT paper in the nation’s capital.

The city’s conservative paper, the Washington Times, ran a supportive op-ed titled “Donald Trump holds high the flag for gay equality,” which indicates that conservatives may be more comfortable with a gay-inclusive GOP than the LGBT establishment is.

Update: In mid-December, Out magazine was still complaining that “It’s telling that when Donald Trump awkwardly waved a rainbow flag during a Colorado rally in October, the banner was upside down.”

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The Rejection of Compromise: Take Two

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The polarizing conflict between religious liberty (here without the delegitimatizng “scare quotes” so ubiquitous in LGBT circles) and gay rights/LGBT anti-discrimination law was addressed by Jonathan Rauch, a past Independent Gay Forum contributing author, when he spoke at the University of Illinois Law School recently (viewable here via YouTube, about 40 minutes).

Rauch starts by noting that to understand where we are in the discussion of gay rights versus religious liberty, consider two bills now before Congress:

One is called the Equality Act. It would grant [LGBT] Americans…protection from housing, employment and public-accommodations discrimination under federal law, which is something that we lack at present. It’s championed by Democrats and liberals.

The other piece of legislation is called the First Amendment Defense Act, or FADA. It would pre-emptively shield all those people who object to same sex marriages or who choose to discriminate against same-sex marriages…whether on religious or moral grounds…from any federal sanction or disallowance of benefit…. It is championed, as you would imagine, by Republicans and conservatives.

Though coming at the question from opposite corners, the two bills have something in common: each tries to take all the marbles and leave the other side with nothing, or at least with as little as possible. The Equality Act includes a provision revoking any protection which religious objectors might enjoy under the [federal] Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The First Amendment Defense Act shields the objectors from discrimination while leaving gay people wholly unprotected from discrimination under federal law.

If these bills are opening positions in a negotiation, then what should ultimately happen is legislative bargaining leading to the obvious compromise: protections for gay people plus exemptions for religious objectors.

That, however, seems unlikely to happen because advocates on both sides aren’t interested in forging a compromise—which, Rauch notes, is “emblematic of an unfortunate development: an issue on which a few years ago there seemed to be reasonably good prospects for reasonable accommodations…has hardened into legal and political trench warfare.”

To which I’d add, the polarization/compromise-rejection serves those who don’t actually want a solution because they profit from permanent cultural warfare. And that’s because ongoing cultural war equals (1) big money flowing to advocacy groups and (2) hot-button issues that the political parties can use to fire-up their respective bases.

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No Compromise, Declare LGBT Activists

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Buzzfeed takes a look at the growing split among LGBT activists groups about whether to pursue the achievable—additional state and perhaps federal legislation outlawing employment and housing discrimination against LGBT individuals—or oppose such legislation unless it also covers public accommodations, which would extend to everything from Christian bakers who don’t want to put two grooms atop a wedding cake to private businesses that want restrooms restricted to biological genders.

Reports Buzzfeed’s Dominic Holden:

One key player is the Gill Foundation…. Gill and several groups that receive its grants, including Freedom for All Americans and the National Center for Transgender Equality, contend this sort of compromise may be their only shot of winning civil rights for millions of LGBT people at the state level in the next decade, even if those gains are incomplete. Leaders of those organizations say they can return to these legislatures in the future to finish the job of passing public accommodations when the issue becomes more palatable.

But groups across the field, including the ACLU and the Human Rights Campaign, have argued the short-term gain approach could amount to entering a box canyon. It may take years to pass laws that provide public protections in the future — if ever. And leaving them out may even send a message that discrimination in public is acceptable.

The ACLU sent a blunt letter to Pennsylvania lawmakers and organizations on June 10 detailing their objections to the compromise bill.

I think anti-discrimination laws are often misused and that applying local ordinances on public accommodations to persecute small business owners who, as a matter of their religious convictions, decline to provide creative services to same-sex weddings is gruesomely authoritarian. But I can accept workplace and housing statutes, and apparently so can a lot of transgendered people. As Buzzfeed notes:

In Ohio, LGBT activists shut down a bill this session that left out transgender people. However, Grant Stancliff, a spokesperson for Equality Ohio, told BuzzFeed News that a bill that includes transgender people, yet leaves out public accommodations, may be an appealing compromise to some activists.

“We have heard from transgender people that the biggest wound is in housing and employment,” he said. “So if we were able to secure that, the material benefit for a lot of people’s lives would be pretty big.”

One has to wonder how much of the “no compromise” intransigence is principled opposition on the all-or-nothing front, and how much is based on knowing that not passing anti-discrimination legislation at all is more likely to keep the base fired up and shelling out the bucks.

More. For more than two decades the Human Rights Campaign has failed to pass its signature legislative goal, which for most of that time was the Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) and is now the Equality Act. This includes periods with both a Democratic president and Democratic congress (under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama), and periods with a Republican congress but enough GOP support to push ENDA through. What happened? Every time the measure was poised to pass, activist groups would insert some new provision that would lose majority support (adding transgender protections most prominently, and now the expansion to include public accommodations). Or, as with ENDA under Harry Reid’s Senate and Nancy Pelosi’s House, the Democrats would strangely fail to move the bill out of committee, with nary a protest from HRC—until Republicans were back in charge.

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Log Cabin Makes Most of Bad Situation

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The Log Cabin Republicans national office has issued a statement explaining why they aren’t endorsing Donald Trump, while acknowledging the fact (so cravenly misreported by the Democratic Party aligned LGBT media) that Trump is the best GOP presidential nominee on LGBT issues:

Mr. Trump is perhaps the most pro-LGBT presidential nominee in the history of the Republican Party. His unprecedented overtures to the “LGBTQ community”—a first for any major-party candidate in our nation’s history—are worthy of praise, and should serve as a clarion call to the GOP that the days of needing to toe an anti-LGBT line are now a thing of the past.

But Log Cabin Republicans have long emphasized that we are not a single-issue organization, nor are our members single-issue voters. Even if we were, rhetoric alone regarding LGBT issues does not equate to doctrine. As Mr. Trump spoke positively about the LGBT community in the United States, he concurrently surrounded himself with senior advisors with a record of opposing LGBT equality, and committed himself to supporting legislation such as the so-called “First Amendment Defense Act” that Log Cabin Republicans opposes.

Should Mr. Trump become our nation’s next President, Log Cabin Republicans welcomes the opportunity to work with his administration to ensure the advances in LGBT freedom we have fought for and secured will continue. Until and unless that happens, our trust would be misplaced.

LCR was in a difficult situation. Trump’s personality defects and dismissiveness toward certain liberty rights are what disqualify him, making it hard or impossible for many Republicans of conscience to give Trump their support. But being anti-gay is not one of his deficiencies.

As I’ve said, both Clinton and Trump are terrible choices. Hopefully, four years from now the country can rectify its mistake.

More. As noted in my last post, gay Trump supporters can make a legitimate case even if it’s one I don’t embrace, as others are doing. But LGBT progressives have gone off the deep end with anti-Trump fear-mongering, in service (of course) to the one true party.

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The Other Option

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Terry Michael, who supports Libertarian Gary Johnson, asks a pertinent question: “Why do LGBT voters ask so little of Hillary? He writes:

I am baffled how organizations supposedly representing us have positioned the LGBT community as an adjunct to the Democratic Party. … The prime example of LGBT organizations seduced by the Democratic Party and The Clintons is the Human Rights Campaign — the other HRC — and its executive director, Chad Griffin, a Clinton crony from Bill’s hometown of Hope, Ark.

As I’ve said, Griffin’s HRC and other well-heeled LGBT lobbies are first and foremost Democratic machine operations, with a mission to corral LGBT dollars and votes for the party ticket.

More. Via the Wall Street Journal, ‘Country’ Gay Couple Backing Trump Receives Threats and Barbs—From Other Gay Men:

It’s not OK to be gay, and also support Donald Trump—that’s the overwhelming reaction from more than 900 people who commented on a Wall Street Journal video of a young couple at a Trump rally posted to Facebook earlier this month.

The Journal’s interview with Dewey Lainhart, 31 years old, and his fiance Cody Moore, 22 years old, at Mr. Trump’s rally in Cincinnati on Oct. 13 has gotten around 200,000 views.

In the video, Mr. Lainhart says he works in the steel industry and shares Trump’s skepticism about multilateral trade deals. He says, “It’s time for a change, and Trump’s the man for it.” He started a Facebook page in support of the candidate called “LGBT for Trump.”…

Most of the comments ridiculed Messrs. Lainhart and and Moore for supporting Mr. Trump — calling them “rednecks” and suggesting that someone should “take away their gay card.”

I’m a free-trade supporter (just one reason I can’t back Trump), but the condescension toward this couple and the call to “take away their gay card” is classic.

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An Honest Look at Trump

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As readers know, I’ll be voting for Gary Johnson on the Libertarian ticket—not because I think he’d be a great president, but because the major party candidates are both personally repugnant advocates of, in different respects, truly awful policies. The next four years, most likely under Clinton, will be a rough patch in any event.

That said, readers also know that I am sickened by the way LGBT progressives have, with utter dishonesty, characterized Donald Trump as “anti-gay” because that false narrative serves their party. At some point, the mendacity is so corrupting that one can only despair of these people.

So I welcomed David Lampo’s A Gay Defense of Donald Trump, one small voice of reason amid a sea of hysterical base-frightening in the Washington Blade. As Lampo writes:

The fact is that any honest look at Trump’s record and views on gay rights shows that most of the attacks by gay Democrats on his views are simply incorrect.

Trump, of course, has been a New York Democrat and social liberal for most of his adult life, chummy with many Democratic politicians, including the Clintons, and active in many charities, including support for AIDS charities. He has a long record of public support for expanding gay rights, including adding sexual orientation to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He stated support for employment nondiscrimination as far back as 2000 in his book, “The America We Deserve,” in which he wrote of his support for a country “free of racism, discrimination against women, or discrimination against people based on sexual orientation.”

He publicly supported repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and in an interview with The Brody File (a very conservative radio show) in 2011, in response to a question about civil unions, he said, “First of all, I live in New York. I know many, many gay people. Tremendous people. And to be honest with you … I haven’t totally formed my opinion. But there can be no discrimination against gays.”

Lampo concludes:

There’s no doubt one can find much to criticize in Trump (and, for that matter, Hillary Clinton), but to label him anti-gay or a mouthpiece of the religious right is so off-base and incorrect it calls into question the credibility and honesty of those making such accusations.

That’s putting it charitably.

More. A bit off-topic, but this is what you won’t learn about Clinton by reading and viewing liberal media. Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Readers of these pages know of the Uranium One deal in which a Canadian businessman got Bill Clinton to help him get control of uranium mining fields in Kazakhstan. The businessman soon gave $31 million to the Clinton Foundation, with a pledge of $100 million more. Uranium One acquired significant holdings in the U.S. A Russian company moved to buy it. The deal needed U.S. approval, including from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

While it was under consideration the Clinton Foundation received more money from Uranium One. Bill Clinton got a $500,000 speech fee. Mrs. Clinton approved the deal. The Russian company is now one of the world’s largest uranium producers. Significant amounts of U.S. uranium are, in effect, owned by Russia. This summer a WikiLeaks dump showed the State Department warning that Russia was moving to control the global supply of nuclear fuel. The deal went through anyway, and the foundation flourished.

In addition:

Peter Schweizer, who broke the Uranium One story, reported in these pages how Mrs. Clinton also pushed for a U.S.-Russian technology initiative…. Of the 28 announced “key partners,” 60% had made financial commitments to the Clinton Foundation. Even Russian investors ponied up. … U.S. military experts warned of satellite, space and nuclear technology transfers. The FBI thought the Russian partners’ motive was to “gain access to classified, sensitive, and emerging technology.” WikiLeaks later unearthed a State Department cable expressing concern about the project. Somehow, said Mr. Schweizer, the Clinton State Department “missed or ignored obvious red flags.”

This is why Clinton will be a disastrous president. But the media, which is full of Trump’s supposed fealty to Putin, covers up Clinton’s venality. Corruption all round.

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Life at ‘GULPTAB’

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The leftwing site Huffington Post “Queer Voices” has posted a funny video take-down of LGBT advocacy groups.

If you didn’t know it was intended as a protest against “the modern climate of corporate LGBT activism,” showing that “Corporates commodify LGBT activism with the same zeal that they’ve commodified self-love,” as the video’s creators state in the accompanying “Queer Voices” article, you’d just think the satire was spot-on (unless, of course, the description is part of the satire).

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BladeWatch

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Increasingly, there is no longer an LGBT rights movement. Clearly, the gay rights movement of the 70s, which became the lesbian and gay rights movement of the 80s and 90s, is gone—for the most part, a victim of its own success after the victories for military inclusion and marriage equality.

Today, there’s an archly politically correct transgender movement that’s focused on bathroom access (a legitimate issue greatly magnified by both sides, with few documented cases of actual discrimination in practice beyond the controversy around minors in public schools) and correct pronouns (often taken to ridiculous extremes). And there’s the Democratic party’s ongoing crusade to recruit LGBT votes and dollars by any means at hand. For the most part, the LGBT media has been thoroughly co-opted into this endeavor.

Lately, reading the Washington Blade is akin to reading The Onion, except that the latter often makes more sense. A few recent examples.

Headline: Trump makes ‘religious liberty’ a priority at anti-LGBT confab.

Excerpt:

Donald Trump didn’t make any explicit anti-LGBT remarks during his speech Friday at the Values Voter Summit, but loaded his remarks with coded language on “religious liberty” to indicate support for undermining LGBT rights.

The meme that religious liberty and the right to religious dissent are not only unacceptable anti-state activity but the worst kind of bigotry is thoroughly entrenched in the left-thought of the day. This, of course, all goes to forcing independent business owners to provide creative services to same-sex weddings, which, along with gender-appropriate pronouns, has become the dominant cause of what presents itself as the LGBT rights movement. That so many of the progressive mindset can’t, or won’t, see how ugly and authoritarian this has become is a sad commentary on moral corruption that dresses itself in the self-righteous narcissism of the politically correct and morally superior, fighting the “bigots” who won’t do as the progressive state decrees, clinging to their false superstitions and mistaken beliefs that individuals have a right not to be compelled to violate their “faith” principles.

Another headline: ID laws may ‘disenfranchise’ 34,000 trans voters.

Excerpt:

More than 34,000 transgender Americans in eight states could be prevented from voting in the November 2016 election because of strict voter identification laws that require voters to present government-issued photo IDs at the polls, according to a newly released report.

Just as, apparently, transgender persons can also no longer fly on airplanes or enter government buildings, since government-issued ID is also required for these activities. The fact that this big lie against voter ID is used with such unembarrassed impunity tells you all you need to know about the dishonesty of the contemporary progressive left and the degree to which LGBT activism and media have sunken down into the muck.

More. No voter fraud in the U.S. to speak of, Democrats say with a straight face. Of course, they know the truth. Corruption all round.

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Progressive ‘Love’

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Via the Washington Post:

As thousands of Donald Trump’s supporters left his rally here this week, they were greeted by protesters who accused them of being, among other things, racist, hateful and uneducated.

“Grow a brain, b—-!” one protester shouted at a Trump backer. Another pointed at rallygoers and yelled: “Racist a——s!” A third held a sign that read: “Make racists afraid again.”

Then they chanted in unison: “Love trumps hate! Love trumps hate! Love trumps hate!”

And they’ll never see the irony.

Daniel Henninger writes in the Wall Street Journal:

The moral clarity that drove the original civil-rights movement or the women’s movement has degenerated into a confused moral narcissism. One wonders if even some of the people in Mrs. Clinton’s Streisandian audience didn’t feel discomfort at the ease with which the presidential candidate slapped isms and phobias on so many people.

Nay. This is what they think.

Even better, via the Washington Blade.

As I said, LGBT supporters stand with Clinton on ‘deplorables’ remark. They can’t see that demonizing your opponent’s voters, rather than criticizing your opponent, is a terrible strategy in a democracy. But then, it’s all about signalling the moral superiority of the progressive base.

In the end, however, Hillary’s LGBT smugfest with Barbra may turn out to be one hell of a costly fundraiser.

Gregory Angelo of the Log Cabin Republicans has observed, correctly, that when it comes to LGBT inclusion Trump is “one of the best, if not the best” (meaning least worst) Republican presidential nominees ever. Democrats, with some justification, can laugh at that as a weak standard. But that’s not what they’re doing—they’re portraying Trump as the most anti-gay Republican ever (the Blade cartoonist warns he’ll be closing down gay bars). That’s just partisan hackery.

And more from supporters of the Party of Love.

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