Yes, friends, as Republicans such as Glenn Beck vie with each other to throw gay-bashers under the bus, and the bashers return the favor, it's George Orwell Newspeak time again! Today the Ministry of Truth speaks, in the person of Winston Smith:
At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia...Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.
1984
Smith continued,
The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia...And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'.
The inspiration for all of that was the outbreak of the Cold War, where the Right wanted to pretend that it had never been part of the alliance with Stalin's Russia, and wanted to root out everyone in government who actually had done so, including President Eisenhower. Simultaneously, the Chinese Communists were nearing victory, with an unbreakable alliance with the Soviet Union. (Until, of course, it did break.)
But such things have happened so often since that it is a standard trope in political discourse. The US was never allied with Saddam Hussein, for example. Put that photo of Rumsfeld and Saddam shaking hands down the memory hole right now!
When did Republicans come out against Gay (properly LGBT) rights? Two millennia back, at the time of Jesus and thus of the beginnings of Christianity? Something like 3,500 years ago, when Moses set down the Law? But maybe it was 4,000 years ago, in the time of Noah's naked, drunken, lying about after the first wine-making from the first grape harvest after the Flood, and of the extremely ambiguous Curse of Ham for whatever it was he did or didn't do. It could even be 6,000 years ago, plus or minus, with the creation of Adam, who in this reckoning is the first Jew and also the first modern Republican, at least in Spirit.
Although it is apparently possible to argue that Adam and Eve were the first Liberal hippies, running around naked in the garden and then going against God's Will and eating the forbidden fruit instead of Just Saying No. Everything since is certainly all their fault, and clearly we Progressives are, too, along with all of the riff-raff we support.
Alternatively, it could go back to our proto-human ancestors, but that's crazy talk. You might as well blame it on the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
In real life, however, it didn't happen as a matter of political policy until after LGBTs started to come out of the closet in large numbers and ask for rights, around the time of the novel Advise and Consent (1959), and much more strongly after the Stonewall Riots. Before that, there was nothing to oppose except the very existence of bisexuals and gays such as Oscar Wilde, in Victorian England, or mathematician, codebreaker, and computer pioneer Alan Turing up through World War II.
We could get into the whole sorry history of gay-bashing, but it's been done. You don't need me to tell you where you can read up on it. Google, Wikipedia, and Amazon are your friends. We are going to concentrate on two events, the folding of Christian Right bigotry into the Republican Southern Strategy, and the astonishingly rapidity of the bigots being thrown under the bus on this issue.
I will simply note that
- Many societies don't care about the issue, or celebrate, even revere, gay relationships. This has been true throughout recorded history.
- Small gay rights movements appeared in Europe in the 19th century, and expanded very gradually.
- Hitler and the Nazis officially regarded homosexuality as on a par with Jewishness or Communism. They were all to be persecuted equally rigorously, although the party had tolerated Ernst Rohm and his followers for some years. Now, let's be clear. I am not comparing Republicans to Nazis. Republican Christians only want to cure teh Gay, not organize another genocide.
- Decriminalizing teh Gay began in earnest in a number of countries after World War II, and was largely completed in the US with the striking down of the Texas anti-sodomy laws by the Supreme Court in 2003.
Although the Republican Southern Strategy of racism first appeared at the 1964 Republican Convention, as described by special guest Jackie Robinson, the 1964 nominee, Barry Goldwater, was forceful in his opposition to gay-bashing and to the Christian Right, continuing for the rest of his life.
For example,
Every good Christian should line up and kick Jerry Falwell's ass.
and this
You don't need to be 'straight' to fight and die for your country, you just need to shoot straight.
and this
At 85, after a life in politics spanning five decades (he retired from the Senate in 1987), Mr. Conservative has found himself an unlikely new career: as a gay rights activist. While that's not his sole pursuit – he returned to Capitol Hill yesterday to testify in favor of scenic overflights of the Grand Canyon – in recent years he's championed homosexuals serving in the military and has worked locally to stop businesses in Phoenix from hiring on the basis of sexual orientation. This month he signed on as honorary co-chairman of a drive to pass a federal law preventing job discrimination against homosexuals. The effort, dubbed Americans Against Discrimination, is being spearheaded by the Human Rights Campaign Fund, the influential gay lobbying organization.
"The big thing is to make this country, along with every other country in the world with a few exceptions, quit discriminating against people just because they're gay," Goldwater asserts. "You don't have to agree with it, but they have a constitutional right to be gay. And that's what brings me into it."
We have always been at war
Ronald Reagan was more conflicted.
Reagan's position on gay rights has been a subject of controversy.
In the late 1970s he wrote a response in his LA Herald-Examiner column to the organization backing the California Briggs Initiative, stating that he opposed the proposed ban on gay public school teachers or anyone who supported gay rights.
He opposed efforts to repeal the criminal laws against homosexuality and generally opposed gay rights legislation as eroding traditional moral values.
Yet his daughter, Patti Davis, wrote in article in the New York Times where she recalled her father talking about Rock Hudson's homosexuality in an accepting and tolerant manner. He also never publicly made any specifically condemning remarks against homosexuals.
But this was the time when the stridently anti-gay Religious Right was gearing up, inspired in part by Jimmy Carter's success in getting elected President combined with loathing for his rather enlightened version of Christianity. Christian gay-bashing took off with Anita Bryant and Save Our Children in 1977, followed by the founding of Christian Voice in 1978. Moral Majority (Jerry Falwell), and Washington for Jesus appeared in the early 1980s. Pat Robertson founded the Christian Coalition in 1987. Later on Dr. James Dobson started Focus on the Family and its lobbying arm, the Family Research Council.
The Republican Party, running at that time on the Southern Strategy of coded racism, eagerly embraced the Christian Right, and the Christian Right even more eagerly set out to take over the apparatus of the Republican Party by volunteering for everything. This mutual embrace includes the anti-gay movement, also based largely in the South, and all of the other Christian Right issues, such as abortion, teaching evolution, and so on.
The sordid details of the last 30 years of explicitly political gay-bashing are widely documented. Things have generally gotten worse over time with religious objections to teh Gay, including hate crimes, and quite recently this:
Dear Edward,
A supporter of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) offered a solution to "gay" marriage at an anti-LGBT rally in Indianapolis this week: Hang same-sex couples.
NOM supporters don’t think it’s enough to take away our rights. They want to take away our lives.
Image
The Solution to Gay Marriage
Leviticus 20:13
If a man also lieth with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them.
with two nooses.
Wait, does he mean actual lynchings?
We have never been at war
Not gonna happen. In fact,
NOM rushes to deny everything.
The reason why gay-bashing is getting hysterical right now is because it has lost, and they are trying to make up for decreasing numbers with volume and nastiness. We have data on that phenomenon, known as Cognitive Dissonance. The truth is, it's over. The anti-gay movement is one of those proverbial dinosaurs that is too stupid to know that its brain is dead and the rest of it should fall down now.
Switching back to a more popular metaphor of the moment, Republicans are fairly rapidly throwing Evangelical Christian bigots under the bus on this one. Not on abortion, not on school vouchers, not on human rights coming only from God, not on a host of other issues. Those will have to wait a few years more. But on gay-bashing, forget it. Gay marriage and DADT are going through in public opinion and in the courts, and will cease to be national political issues. Locally, in the more benighted states, there will be resistance to recognizing out-of-state same-sex marriages, but only until the courts firmly reject it on Constitutional grounds (Full Faith and Credit Clause), and it starts to jeopardize Federal funding of state programs.
Why do I say that gay-bashing is going under the bus? Let's look at some recent facts. I have already dissected the recent CNN poll results on Gay Marriage (including cross-tabulations), the first to show a majority of Americans in support. Here is a graph from Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com. It shows support for gay marriage running even with opposition, but with support now growing at 4% annually, up from the 1–1.5% range.
The relatively young Rightwing activists at the CPAC (Conservative Political Action Committee) Convention have been saying that they don't care about gay marriage as a political issue. It gets only a few percent rating as either the most or second most important issue, far, far below cutting taxes. In Sept. 2009, it polled at 7%, and in Feb. 2010 at 1%.
This year, also in February, a gay Republican organization was permitted not only to take part in CPAC but to be co-sponsors, over the no-longer-controlling objections of the Religious Right faction. For example, Liberty University’s law school withdrew their sponsorship in protest, and CPAC went ahead anyway.
GOProud Returns to CPAC
CPAC Goes Gay
CPAC Conference Dissolves Into Right-Wing Civil War Over Gay Rights
In the name of freedom, I would like to also thank the American Conservative Union for welcoming GOProud as a co-sponsor of this event. (loud boos) Not because of any politics, but because of the message that it sends: If what you truly care about is freedom, limited government, and prosperity, then this symbol is a step in the right direction, and look to the student movement for support! (heckling) The typical Student’s response is to be socially tolerant and fiscally responsible. Students today recognize that freedom does not come in pieces. It is a single concept that we must defend at all times.
Alexander McCobin, a member of Students for Liberty
Glenn Beck has flipflopped.
Glenn Beck: Gay Marriage NOT Threat To America (VIDEO)
"I don't think marriage, that the government actually has anything to do with...that is a religious right...Will the gays come and get us?"
Beck quoted Thomas Jefferson: "If it neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket, what difference is it to me?"
Ann Coulter is scheduled to headline a gay conference on Sept. 25, but without any change in her opinions. She is expected to deliver one of her patented gay-bashing tirades to much laughter.
"Homocon 2010," a party put on by GOProud, a 14-month-old gay conservative organization..
Ann Coulter Puts the "Con" in "Homocon 2010"
Ann Coulter: The Right Wing's Judy Garland?
The remaining bigots have wasted no time in trying to throw her under the bus, starting, in fact, several months earlier. I guess they got the memo before we did.
Ann Coulter Defends Same-Sex Marriage?
Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily is particularly angry.
The homo con continues
The Republicans and "conservatives" are now lining up to support GOProud's "Homocon" event in New York next month—now that Ann Coulter has accepted the keynote speaker role...
Suffice it to say, I told you so.
I told you this event was aptly named. It literally represents the homo conning of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
This is exactly what I was warning about when we made the decision to drop Ann Coulter from the presenters at the "Taking American Back National Conference" in Miami – one week before this Homocon event. This is shaping up to be a significant turning point for the late-great conservative movement and the Republican Party.
If ever there were a time for Republicans and conservatives to stand up and be counted, this is it...
So far, as far as I can see, I am the only high-profile national personality to warn of the serious threat this radical group poses to confused Republicans and conservatives apparently not well-grounded enough in biblical values and the very meaning of the word "conservative."
Join me in Miami for what has been planned as an alternative to this kind of surrender – the "Taking America Back National Conference" Sept. 16-18.
I will spare you Coulter's retort.
With all of that, former RNC Chairman and gay-basher-in-chief Ken Mehlman coming out of the closet has been a complete anticlimax.
What comes next? Well, Gandhi said,
First they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
But the stage after that is them claiming that it was their idea all along, like MS Governor Haley Barbour claiming that Southern Republicans led the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.
Here you go.
GOP's Surprise Gay-Rights Push
by Anthony Woods
You see, it was the Log Cabin Republicans who brought suit to have DADT overturned as unconstitutional, starting in 2004.
So, you know those last 30+ years of gay-bashing? You didn't get that from us. That must have come from Big Brother's mortal enemy Emmanuel Goldstein or some other lousy Liberal.