Between the Hamas and Hezbollah Huggers on the left and the gay haters on the right, it can get lonely.
Let’s call the Hamas/Hezbollah Huggers the “HHH”. And, then, there are the “gay haters” on the religious right? Are they merely strong “dislikers” of The Gay and LGBT in general?
OK, these gay “dislikers” claim they don’t hate, they just think the Gay is a “lifestyle” that can be cured or prayed into non-existence. Good luck with that.
I’m not always inclined to eschew hyperbole, but in political discourse a person must tread carefully, if he or she wishes to communicate and not simply engage in rhetorical grandstanding. But, it is hard having to hear nonsense about LGBT people on one hand, and on the other – to hear the most radically hateful torturers of gay and lesbian, and sometimes trans people lauded, often by LGBT people themselves.
But let’s start with the facts. The Christians who are anti-LGBT are easy targets. Which isn’t to say they aren’t dangerous or at least — very irritating, but they are sitting duck targets. Call them stupid, hateful and misinformed and you’ve won the day. Not only because you are right as per their views on LGBT rights and people, but also because they are now becoming easy pickings. Even prominent conservative Republicans are beginning to see that gay people have rights and can’t be prayed to straight salvation. I mean Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Rob Portman, and of course, the fighter for gay marriage — Ted Olson. So, it is easier now, with the tide turning, to ridicule the conservatives who cling to gay hating, and you can kick their imagined or real Hillbilly ways and government funded wheelchairs, as in this post:
When your godless Marxist president and his thuggish fascist cabinet officers and his entire godless liberty-hating socialist democrat party and sicko sycophant complicit leftist mainstream media and the god-hating, constitution-twisting black-robed socialist liberal activist judges continue conspiring to promote homosexualism and perversion as not only normal but a healthy, wholesome, desirable activity and way of life and then force it into the curriculum of even our youngest school children, that is tyranny!
You can, poke fun at their perceived inability to distinguish Hitler from Stalin, as some commenters on the above rant do. Certainly this will prove that you are very smart…right? But then, what do you do with the LGBT activists who are often unable to distinguish Hamas from the NAACP?
In the universe of left wing Hamas huggers, anyone who would chide Hamas and deign to point out that women in Gaza are being jailed for having out of wedlock babies, and that people who smoke Hashish are being executed, after a year in prison, are simply being “racist. Hamas and Hezbollah don’t want simple peace and a beneficial co-existence with Israel; they want Israel’s complete and utter destruction. You don’t even want to know how they kill gay people. Let’s leave it at that. These left wing sophisticates seem to want to ignore willfully, that Islam is not a race, and that the radical Islam of Hamas is anti-woman’s rights, and very much anti-gay rights. In fact, it is anti-human rights, and so anti-equality. The concept of “human rights” appears to be missing altogether from the Hamas charter; the idea that every last Jew on earth must be killed, is not.
But I can already hear the cries, the Hamas and Hezbollah Huggers screaming, “But, what about the horrible Christians!” It is true, of course, that there are indeed “horrible Christians” walking amongst us, or at least, Christians who are against gay marriage, or possibly — against even any semblance of gay rights. Most extremely, again, there are Christians who believe that lesbians and gays are “perverse”, and can be prayed to a “cure”, their numbers are dwindling, but they are around. I won’t deny it. These same Christians are most likely not friendly with transsexual people either, or transgender. They are a problem in my universe, don’t get me wrong, I have real issues with this particular Jesus fandom.
However, it is also true that some of these Christians while having reprehensible or just plain mistaken beliefs about LGBT people are otherwise, decent and good people. I know at least one online, and I have known a few in passing, I am related to a few.
Hamas and Hezbollah hugging (“HHH”) left-wingers may also otherwise be decent, intelligent and even – “educated”. Take for example, the well known and influential Hamas/Hezbollah hugger Judith Butler! That woman is obviously “educated”, she now teaches gender performativity at Columbia, but apparently still can’t distinguish Hamas/Hezbollah from social movements that are part of the progressive left. Here:
“Understanding Hamas/Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left, is extremely important. “
Below, a nuanced and fair denouement of Butler’s views by Michael Totten. The entire statement from Butler above is quoted and put in context, and her latter statements are also considered. Totten points out that to her credit, Butler has stated she is not in favor of violence, although, as he also points out, violence is certainly being used by the most un-socially liberal Hamas and Hezbollah to accomplish their stated goal of erasing Israel. There is no other way to eradicate a country. And, how Butler can conflate Hamas or Hezbollah with social progress is an obscure point indeed.
Anti-Imperialism Fools
Butler later attempted a facile and smug de-construction of her statements with her usual rhetorical slight of hand, but I can’t help but feel cynical about her smug quibbling. To be fair, she may be denouncing violence, but she is not denouncing Hamas or Hezbollah, and she must if she is to come out on the righteous end of human history. And it is impossible to separate these two organizations from violence. Here a very good assessment of Butler’s inability to tell the good guys from the bad guys, here from writer Petra Marquardt:
“Unsurprisingly, Butler has reacted to criticism of her views regarding Hamas and Hezbollah by complaining that her remarks “have been taken out of context.” Butler mainly emphasizes now that she has “always been in favor of non-violent political action” and explicitly declares: “I do not endorse practices of violent resistance and neither do I endorse state violence, cannot, and never have.”
But it is arguably revealing that Butler chose the Mondoweiss website to publish her most recent rebuttal. Surely an academic of her standing had many other choices and did not have to turn to a site that has often been criticized for posts and as well as antisemitic cartoons? On such a site, it is somewhat strange to read Butler’s lament:
“For those of us who are descendants of European Jews who were destroyed in the Nazi genocide (my grandmother’s family was destroyed in a small village south of Budapest), it is the most painful insult and injury to be called complicitous with the hatred of Jews or to be called self-hating.”
And how come that somebody who evokes such a family history has nothing to say about the Jew-hatred espoused by Hamas and Hezbollah, and their acknowledged ideological sponsors, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian regime?”
Butler is not alone. There are more than a few Big Q – Queers who welcome Hamas into their bag of lefty tricks, and I regard them with as much opprobrium and bewildered angst as I regard the religious, conservative anti-LGBT right. Big Q Queers are, after all, more than simply LGBT, they regard their mission not as gay marriage or gay soldiering, but as a queer transformation of society, an in-your-face adolescent attitude that is as much uptight curmudgeon/snob and disdain of the ordinary or “normal” as it is visionary or leading edge. While I certainly believe it is important and life affirming to always be leading to the future from a place of new possibilities, the facts often lead just as often to older certainties. Sometimes Queer is a posture and a pose and not about leading us all to a better world. But again, let us distinguish between big Q Queers who wish to abolish marriage altogether, and those lesbians and gays who want the option to get married and have legal recognitions, responsibilities and rights — and who wish to lead productive lives, whether or not these lives are perceived as “in your face” or – well, normal. We can’t all be naked and polymorphous perverse in happy communes and not all of us want to be. I, for one, hate long meetings. Some of us are resigned to an LGBT normalcy that is not trend following, but often, profoundly satisfying to live. As a trans guy, I’m mostly just a normal dude. You wouldn’t think twice if you saw me on the street, and that suits me fine.
So, possibly, since they are “in your face” and hate to think of themselves as anything other than special and trendy, it is only logical that the far left Queer contingent would feign a friendly comradely relationship with the extreme and violently queer hating Hamas/Hezbollah. I mean, Hamas and Hezbollah both hate Amerikkka, and maybe, that’s enough.
Even so, I have always expected more discernment from high riding lesbians like Butler and Sarah Schulman. Schulman has been described thus by Daniel Greenfield… (she) was declaring that gay rights in Israel were part of a conspiracy to “pinkwash” the evil Zionist entity.
Sarah Schulman, a gay rights activist, had to make the confusing argument that gay rights activists should support anti-gay Islamists over Israel. And Schulman was predictably incoherent in trying to make that case. While Sarah Schulman accused pro-Israel advocates of pinkwashing Israel, Schulman was the one actually pinkwashing Hamas.
Butler, Sarah Schulman and other high visibility left wing Hamas huggers are a disappointment, a profound one. As a leftist in my not so distant past, I always had expected them to come down on the right side of human rights. But, possibly I was happily deluded. In fact, I now know for sure that I was. I mean, really now, when has the far left ever come down on the humane side of human rights? I don’t mean the moderate left of center of the Democrat party, I mean the far socialist left, and that’s why Jim from the first blog is not confabulating or confused, when he conjoins Hitler, Mussolini, Mao and Stalin – fascists and communists both in an alignment of tyrants, he’s actually absolutely correct. We can thank Jonah Goldberg’s book
Liberal Fascism for his uncovering of this similarity and conjoinment at the waist of Fascism and Communism. In hindsight, one can certain see the family resemblance.
Conflating the tyranny of National Socialism and Communism is not the sign of an uneducated, drooling rube, but of someone with more than a little common sense and possibly even, some historical acumen. If nothing else, it indicates that a person has a bedrock understanding that liberty, fascism and communism, are not bedfellows. Liberty is not aligned with communism or – fascism. Unfortunately, this simple, straightforward and utterly reasonable understanding does not extend to some of the most politically prominent if not actually astute, LGBT intellectuals. Possibly this is because ultimately, liberty is not their chief concern? It is not a core value. I think the same people who are now making positive, warm-feeling statements about Hamas would have been the same people making positive statements about Stalin. They would have declaimed Stalin as an important part of the “social movements” of the “progressive left”.
Now, this is odd, since you would think that Hamas/Hezbollah and the Christian religious right would make good bedfellows, since they are both not exactly queer friendly, however, obviously — this has not proven to be the case. I have found it confounding that the religious right hates Hamas as much as the queer left appears to embrace it. Even though Hamas and Hezbollah would happily make sure that gays are not only unmarried, but also not alive. This gave me pause; did this mean that our own religious, socially conservative right was different from what I come to believe? Well, yes, and also – no. There is a spectrum… some on that side are only critical of the use of the word “marriage” but would grant civil unions, and while not super keen on gayness or trans people are nevertheless of the understanding that LGBT people are not inherently deranged, evil or bad. Some conservatives are fine with gay people, but these cannot be understood as strict social conservatives. However, on the other hand, there are those on the religious right who don’t give two hoots about gay or trans people, make no mistake. They don’t understand us, they don’t like us, they clearly would rather we did not exist, however, they won’t join with Hamas and Hezbollah to kill us. The story is always more complicated, and in this blog I will attempt to shed the light I’ve found.
Certainly I have come to know, with some painful recognition, that the far left was different than what I had always believed. . Although there are also nuances on that side, and complications.
Complications, nuances, and deconstructions aside – the cold fact remains. Many, if not all, on the socially conservative and religious right are still in opposition to basic LGBT civil rights. The far left is infested with the HHH, Hamas/Hezbollah Huggers, who are oblivious to facts and apparently to basic human rights and liberty. Folks like me who see liberty as extending to all, and who believe in individual rights as bedrock to that fundamental liberty — have an issue. For me, neither the Hamas/Hezbollah hugging left, nor the social conservative religious right, are comfortable places to be. I remain an outlander, an outlier, and an outsider… I think both sides are nuts. And, I can’t decide which is more dangerous to my own personal mental health and peace of mind.
Liberty Wolf 