IGF CultureWatch

IGF contributing author Jamie Kirchick writes in the Yale Daily News about his university's glee at landing the former Taliban spokesperson as a student. Comments Kirchick:

Don't expect a word of protest from our feminist and gay groups, who now have in their midst a live remnant of one of the most misogynistic and homophobic regimes ever. They're busy hunting bogeymen like frat parties and single-sex bathrooms. The answer Hashemi gave five years ago when asked about the lack of women's rights in Afghanistan, "American women don't have the right not to find images of themselves in swimsuits on the side of a bus," is the sort of sophistry likely to curry favor among Yale's feminist activists, who make every effort to paint American society as chauvinistic while refraining from criticizing non-Western cultures. To do so would be "cultural imperialism," and we cannot have that at an enlightened place like Yale.

I personally want to know whether Hashemi supports the flattening of homosexuals via brick walls, which was one of the ways the Taliban dealt with gay men.

And so it goes at Yale, Harvard, and the other bastions of elite progressivism, dedicating to training the next generation of would-be apparatchiks and fascism-appeasers.

More. Critics have noted that Yale won't allow ROTC or even military recruiters on campus, but welcome a Taliban spokesperson into their community.
--Stephen H. Miller

IGF contributing author Bruce Bawer's new book, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within, marshals far too many facts to be easily dismissed. As Jonathan Rauch writes in his backcover blurb, "Some books are merely important. This one is necessary."

Among other issues, Bawer details a frightening rise of gay-bashings in Europe by Muslim immigrants, who cite their faith as their motivation-including a beating suffered by his Norwegian partner in Oslo. He writes:

"Soper!" ("Faggot!") the man shouted, charging at him. ... My partner got off at the next stop. So did the man, who leapt on him, kicking and punching. This was in a busy downtown square, crowded with people on their way to work; but although several passersby stopped to watch the assault, no one made a move to intercede. ...

When we got to the police station, the officer on duty told us that the assailant and his wife were there already-and that the wife had accused my partner of attempted murder. This, he explained wearily, was a familiar tactic in the immigrant milieu: rushing to the police station to file charges against your victim before he can report you. We were outraged. But the cop shrugged it off and urged us to do the same.

And on and on, in France, the Netherlands, Germany, and throughout Europe, where attacks and intimidation are mounting rapidly, "while Europe sleeps."

The Right Side of the Rainbow blog links to a recent Mark Steyn column, which notes:

...radical young Muslim men are changing the realities of daily life for Jews and gays and women in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo and beyond.

Steyn is a conservative, and the fight against Islamofascism may indeed make strange bedfellows of (some) gays and (some) conservatives (i.e., those who believe in conserving Western Civ.). But (some) social conservatives on the religious right may well envy what radical Islam has in store for the "perverts," while (some) gays on the anti-American, anti-Israel left will dream their sweet, false dreams of benevolent multiculturalism and moral relativism, until it's too late to save themselves.

Note: As requested, I've added some additional "somes" to the above.

More Recent Postings
02/19/06 - 02/25/06

Writing in the American Prospect, E.J. Graff breathlessly announces an exciting new strategy to energize the gay movement and the fight for marriage equality. Here it comes: "LGBT groups are helping to build a new progressive coalition from the ground up." Ta-da!

Sadly, it sounds like the "new strategy" is once again to practice diversity fetishism with an alphabet-soup-of-the-left project, which always does so well (not). If you believe that a grand coalition led by the likes of Urvashi Vaid (a blast from the past, see here) and built around efforts by the NAACP, the United Farm Workers, and "Asian American and Pacific Islander groups" will win over the suburban independents, enjoy your fantasy.

More. Reader Lori Heine commments:

We have not done ourselves any real favors by becoming so entangled with broad, Left-Wing coalitions. In my conversations with conservatives, I generally find these individuals less hostile to gay rights than they are to liberals in general. And they tend to stick all "liberal" issues together into one big, gooey, scary mess.

I believe we would get a better reception from those Right-of-Center, or even at the Center, if we made them deal with our own issue apart from any other. ...

Quite so, or at least ensure a real "diversity" of approaches, with frozen-in-time "progressives" outreaching to labor unions and racial-grievance collectors, while those of a more conservative or libertarian bent form alliances with their kindred spirits.

The New Yorker's Brokeback Bush and Cheney cover, that is.

I'm headed out of town to attend to family matters, so you won't have Steve to kick around (for a few days).

USA Today looks at the growing efforts to ban gays and lesbians from adopting children, which it labels "a second front in the culture wars" over same-sex marriage. Steps to pass laws or secure November ballot initiatives are underway in at least 16 states.

It could be that before too long, gays-especially couples-who are able to do so, really will have to relocate themselves to those states that don't trample them underfoot.

Reason Online responds, primarily by referencing Julian Sanchez's Reason magazine article on the growing fight. Sanchez suggests that opponents of gay adoption:

...visit Florida and ask a child in foster care which makes him feel more threatened: the thought of being raised by homosexuals, or the prospect of an indefinite number of years spent passing through an indefinite number of homes.

One of the Reason blog's readers disputes that the kids would choose the gay parents (I guess some probably wouldn't, depending on whether they're old enough to have imbibed schoolyard homophobia). Another reader paraphrases libertarian humorist P.J. O'Rourke along the lines of:

I am such an extreme Republican that I support gay marriage and adoption. If gay people get married and raise kids, pretty soon they'll be living in suburbs, driving SUV's and voting Republican.

Well, in another universe where Republicans where true to their own best values, maybe.

I'm glad former congressman Kweisi Mfume, one of the leading Democratic candidates for Maryland's U.S. Senate seat, has endorsed marriage rights for gay couples. However, his endorsement would be more likely to sway the uncommitted if his own record on marriage had been more, let's say, supportive (i.e., Mfume has fathered five children out of wedlock with four different women). His more recent behavior has also been less than exemplary on the marriage front.

True, Mfume is certainly less of a hypocrite than gay marriage opponents such as Bob Barr, the former Georgia congressman who pushed the Defense of Marriage Act prohibiting federal recognition of gay unions, which led many to wonder which of his three marriages (via two divorces) he was defending. Still, supporters like Mfume aren't very likely to advance the cause.

More Recent Postings
02/12/06 - 02/18/06

The "Ask Amy" advice column receives a query from a Colorado woman who had a gay couple move in next door, and who was so shocked by witnessing a goodbye kiss one morning that (on the advice of her pastor) she circulated a petition urging that they refrain from such displays of affection. The woman can't understand why her gay neighbors took it personally.

This dovetails with the point Paul Varnell makes in his recent column, "The War on Gay Visibility."

As Variety reports, gay Indian Muslim filmmaker Parvez Sharma is directing a documentary called "In the Name of Allah" about gay, lesbian, and transgender Muslims across the Muslim and Western worlds. He's working with Sandi Dubowski, whose documentary "Trembling Before G-d" movingly looked at gay orthodox Jews as they told their stories.

Good luck to Sharma and Dubowski. But as the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto warns:

One wonders how this will go over in the Muslim world, which has not of late gained a reputation for tolerance. And if Muslims react to "In the Name of Allah" with half the fury they've directed at those Danish cartoons, which side will our Western multiculturalists come down on?

I guess we'll see.

Given Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh's brutal murder by an Islamic militant upset over Van Gogh's making a movie about the mistreatment of women in Islamic societies, Sharma and Dubowski are brave men.

I liked this column in The Advocate by gay outdoorsman David Stalling, who-referencing the elk hunt in "Brokeback Mountain"-posted a query at a website for bow hunters. He writes:

For fun, on the Big Game Forum, I posted a new thread: "Brokeback Mountain: Best Elk-Hunting Movie?" Since folks on this site often and justly complain of poor Hollywood depictions of hunting, I mentioned that here was a good positive portrayal. The response didn't surprise me. People with screen names like Terminator, Sewer Rat, Bearman, and ElkSlayer wrote things like "No queers could really hunt elk"; "Elk are too majestic an animal to be killed by faggots"; "Imagine a gay elk camp: guys would worry that camouflage makes them look fat."

A lot of anti-gay swill? Sure. But considering that the media images of gays (excepting Brokeback) run the gamut from "Queer Eye" to "Will & Grace"-and these are the representations upon which GLAAD, HRC and The Advocate bestow their effusive praise-is it really any wonder that rural America sees gays the way it does?

Maybe Willie Nelson's new gay cowboy song will help. Or maybe not.

More. I guess not. Willie means well, but the song (penned by Ned Sublette in 1981) promotes the same old stereotypes that conflate sexual orientation and gender identity:

"What did you think all them saddles and boots was about?...Inside every cowboy there's a lady who'd love to slip out."

Alas, still more confusion about sexual orientation and gender identity isn't what gay people need.

Say Anything blog's posting has a link to an audio excerpt.

Some very thoughtful comments (ok, obviously not the first one). Check 'em out.

In Ohio, the Republican House Speaker Jon Husted is opposing a bill to ban gay couples from adopting or providing foster care, and Husted's chief of staff called the measure "divisive legislation," saying that Husted wants to see the House focus on other issues. The Buckeye State's Democratic party chairman told the media that Democrats will likewise work to ensure that the bill never comes to a vote. That's the sort of bipartisanship I like, fair-minded voices in both parties speaking out against the wingnuts, who are usually but not always (see Byrd, Robert) Republicans.

More Recent Postings
02/05/06 - 02/11/06