News/Conversations – GLBT Community Compared to McCarthy (!) and Al-Quaeda
Wow. I mean, wow.
The hypocritical rhetoric being thrown at the gay community is just unreal.
The Anti-Gay Industry has always based and justified most of its positions in reasoning that was some combination of: flawed, magical, hypocritical, misleading and just plain ignorant. I won’t say none of their arguments have traction, but it’s hard to take the AGI’s arguments seriously when they use such flimsy science and selective evidence. Basically, they have a prejudice, and they create or contort science and scripture to support it.
But as far as I’m concerned, they took the rhetoric up a notch when the newly formed Becket Fund published a full-page ad in The New York Times (falsely) denouncing post-Proposition 8 as violent, and accused the GLBT community of inciting hatred and bigotry toward religion.
It keeps getting worse.
The National Organization for Marriage has launched a website called BustTheBlacklist.com to encourage a “buycott” of businesses boycotted by marriage equality supporters (or, in BTB’s words: “targeted for harassment”).
They describe the gay community’s activism:
A new McCarthyism is threatening our free speech and freedom of association—our most basic constitutional rights. Donors who exercised these rights in supporting proposition 8 are seeing their employers or companies being targeted for harassment and intimidation.
The height of hypocrisy. As Good As You.org puts it: You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding. Me!
Good As You has also posted a piece remembering the history of McCarthyism.
This was a dark period on sensationalistic anti-Communist sentiment, in which shady tactics and unsubstantiated claims were to used to discredit political adversaries.
Well fast forward to 2008. We again see politically- and religiously-movitvated folks using claims, this time anti-family ones, to marginalize/discredit/persecute their opposition for their supposed lack of values. We see this crew riling up their supporters with sensationalistic claims. We see them decrying “liberalism” in a way that can, at times, sound suspiciously like the way Republican like McCarthy once decried “the reds.”
Oh, but it doesn’t stop there.
The founder of the Becket Fund, Rev. Seamus Hasson, has compared the outcry of Proposition 8 to … the civil rights movement? Nope. The suffrage movement. Oh goodness, of course not.
Nope, he compares it to Al-Quaeda. GlaadBLOG.org has posted a partial transcript:
Hasson: Well, whether it’s an organized movement like Al Qaeda or whether it’s the Al Qaeda-like, um, inspired acts of terrorism elsewhere, people are right to be concerned about, um, radical Islamist violence-
In a separate post, glaadBLOG comments that “increased visibility comes with increased defamation.” GLAAD takes the opportunity to rebuke media outlets for giving equal voice to the Anti-Gay Industry even when they use outright lies and false information to attack the gay community. It is itself a form of defamation to present baseless anti-gay arguments as having equal standing with gay-friendly positions.
Rather than serving as platforms for lies and inaccuracies, media outlets should be calling out anti-gay activists when they resort to defamation, lies, and rhetoric that promote homophobia. Anti-gay activists have succeeded in taking the right to marry away from loving and committed gay and lesbian couples in California, and are now looking to silence us and gain publicity to spark new waves of anti-gay rhetoric.
We must not let their scare tactics work and must continue to respond to their defamation and raise the visibility of our community and our message of equality.
