Gay voters should blame themselves for Prop 8, not black Californians.
In part, Prop 8 failed because of inept LGBT leadership.
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By CHIP ARNDT
Monday, August 28, 2006
IN’SYNC ALUM Lance Bass has revealed he’s gay and dating my former partner, Reichen Lehmkuhl, igniting a worldwide media frenzy.
Only Mel Gibson’s alcohol-saturated, anti-Semitic tirade interrupted the orgy of stories about the boy band star who kisses boys. The day after Lance’s People magazine cover story hit the newsstands, three thugs attacked six gay men in San Diego with a baseball bat and knife.
About the same time, thugs in New Mexico began to use a gay 18-year-old they had tied up as a human punching bag, beating him until dawn. Though part of a newsworthy nationwide increase in anti-gay assaults, mainstream media ignored their stories.
We’ve seen this pattern before. The mainstream media was a willing participant in the Reagan administration’s initial indifference to AIDS. The month I turned 16, just recognizing my attraction to men, President Reagan’s spokesman made a joke of a reporter’s question about AIDS, mocking him for even asking.
“Trickle down economics” might have been fantasy but their attitude about “the gay plague” was very real and trickled down to local governments and straight media.
Now we have a president who has embraced the anti-gay agenda, using his office as a bully pulpit, emphasis on both words, to demonize gay Americans, offering up red meat for red states.
As in the ’80s, this attitude has trickled down to reenergize those who target our civil liberties. And as in the ‘80s, it has trickled down to some media, too.
In the words of Matt Foreman of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, it “poisons culture and inspires some to believe that it is open season on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.”
RESPECTED MEDIA STOPPED providing platforms years ago to anyone who used the Bible to against racial and religious minorities, but anti-gay-for-pay pros like the ayatollah Jerry Falwell continue with impunity.
Falwell remains their superstar despite a history of outrageous claims such as insisting gays with AIDS were purposely trying to infect others by donating blood, or that we were responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
While epithets against blacks and Jews were banished decades ago from national airwaves, it’s very different at Falwell’s pulpit and the “Church of Cable News.”
MSNBC, for instance, employs its very own sultan of slur, Don Imus, and frequently features freelance hit woman Ann Coulter.
With his perpetual smirk, Imus described out Wimbledon champ Amelie Mauresmo as “a big old lesbo,” and drooled about “Fudgepack Mountain.” Meanwhile MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews chirped about “Bareback Mounting.”
WHICH BRINGS US back to Fraulein Coulter, cable television’s Cobra Woman: all venom all the time. She told Matthews that Bill Clinton is probably a latent homosexual. Then, fangs totally bared:
Matthews: “How do you know that Bill Clinton’s gay?”
Coulter: “He may not be gay, but Al Gore, total fag. No, I’m just kidding.”
Matthews and MSNBC can protest their own innocence while disgracing the First Amendment until they are red, white and blue in the face, and Coulter can call it a joke, but if the same exchange was about race, including the usual slur, it never would have aired.
Would Matthews have called her “brilliant” and thanked her for coming as he did after she called Gore a fag?
Would Mel Gibson’s career be hanging by a thread if instead of anti-Semitic slurs he had asked the cop, “Are you a fag?”
Until we insist that “fag” equals slurs aimed at other groups, we will not be fully free, and we will not be safe. There will be more Matthew Shepards, Billy Jack Gaithers, Gwen Araujos, Stephanie Thomases, Ukea Davises, ad infinitum.
The bashers don’t have to be regular Imus listeners or Coulterites. The slurs and lies of all of those who vilify us eventually merge into one great toxic cloud; each evil individual voice enlarging the chorus cheering our victimization.
Chris Matthews and his ilk may try to wash their blood-stained hands, but we stay silent before them at our peril.
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