It's increasingly difficult to have a real discussion on gay rights in this country. In fact I'd even suggest that without bloggers, there would be no national conversation worthy of repeating. It's one thing to have ineffective gay rights organizations who are seemingly more interested in power and influence than getting our message out - that can be frustrating but a hundred other organizations find their way into the spotlight. The thing that hinders the national conversation on gay rights the most, though, is the fact that the media asks for input from known hate groups and then does not even bother to refer to them as such.
What are we supposed to do? Their plan seems to be to ask "both sides" (gays and the people who want us dead, as you'll see later in this post) to contribute to the discussion, as if hate has just as much merit as freedom, and then to purport to tell their audience that the gay rights opposition spokesperson is "a devout Christian" or a "family spokesperson" when they've actually been listed as known hate groups that exist solely to terrorize gay people. And the plan works for the overclass. After all it's not like we can do much about it. They pretty much get to decide the way things go, as they always have.
Here's the blog Good As You giving a recent example, quoting from the New York Times:
My personal preference would have been a resolution on the House floor,” said XXXXX XXXX, the director of issue analysis for XXXXXXXXXX, a conservative Christian organization in XXXX. “But the political landscape in 1995 meant that the law passed overwhelmingly,” he said. “You may not have the same overwhelming majority on this resolution, so the optics may not be optimum.”
...
Mr. XXXXX of the family organization said he would rather have the House than the Obama administration defend the act. “We think the Department of Justice was making a pretty tepid and halfhearted defense,” he said. “This is such an important public policy law it needs to be defended by someone who believes it is good.”
Okay, so if you're a casual reader, these comments sound perfectly fair and considered. Measured. Thought out. Reasoned and even reasonable, regardless of one's personal support for marriage equality itself. Designed to state the conservative movement's position -- little more.
But what if we told you these quotes come from the same guy who said "Homosexuals in the military gave us...six million dead Jews"? The guy who's said "homosexuals should be disqualified from public office," has called on Christian conservatives to breed gays and progressives out of existence, has called gay sex a "form of domestic terrorism," who's said only gays were savage enough for Hitler, has compared gays to heroin abusers, has directly compared laws against gay soldiers to those that apply to bank robbers, who once invoked a Biblical story about stabbing "sexually immoral" people with spears, saying we need this kind of action in modern day, who has spoken out against gays serving as public school teachers, has questioned why Medals of Honor are given to people who save lives (rather than take lives), who says that open service will "assign the United States to the scrap heap of history," who recently commiserated with Bradlee 'Executing homosexuals is moral' Dean, and who has blamed gay activists for dead gay kids, saying that: "If we want to see fewer students commit suicide, we want fewer homosexual students"? The guy who said the only acceptable "culture war" truce would have gays giving up their demand for equality? The guy who painted Native Americans as innately cursed because they "cling to the darkness of indigenous superstition"? The guy who Warren Throckmorton aptly noted is "to the right of Jerry Falwell" on some LGBT issues? The guy whose words pretty much single-handedly landed the American Family Association on the Southern Poverty Law Center's hate groups list?
And that really changes the whole idea of their article. Do we really want Americans to listen to people like that, without informing them first? I'm all for free speech and letting the bigots speak whenever and wherever they want, but it doesn't have to be unqualified, or in a lot of cases, a disingenuous description of the person they're quoting. These people are in hate groups because they practice hate. It's their strategy to get what they want. And the media is playing it like they're honest brokers just trying to get their side of the story out.
Of course, as Good As You notes, there are no quotes from pro-gay organizations there and only one single sentence devoted to our thoughts. There are several sections devoted to the known hate group.
The other day I wrote about a story on DOMA in which it was revealed that the Family Research Council was trying to convince Speaker Boehner to defend DOMA in court. The article referred to them not as a hate group but as "same-sex marriage opponents":
On the federal level, opponents of same-sex marriage urged Republican leaders in the House of Representatives to intervene on their own to defend the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, against pending court challenges.
"The president has thrown down the gauntlet, challenging Congress," said Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. "It is incumbent upon the Republican leadership to respond by intervening to defend DOMA, or they will become complicit in the president's neglect of duty."
But is it really fair to refer to them as genuine everyday people who just oppose same-sex marriage and want to defend an existing law against court challenges, given the circumstances? This is a hate group who says gays are vicious Nazis. Some people out in the country might not be sure if they support gays getting married or not, but these people do not speak for those sincere and conflicted Americans. This isn't an easy issue for some people and peddling blatant hate speech meant to terrorize a minority community is not the right approach.
If there is sincere disagreement or confusion over what gay rights would entail, the media should talk to people in good faith about it and report back what Americans are saying. Not vicious hate groups.
And, in fact, the first group to cheer Boehner's decision to defend the law was a known hate group.
It's actually pretty amazing to consider we've come as far as we have, recently. The Don't Ask, Don't Tell bill was a success, but throughout that entire process, the FRC spoke for the opposition. All they could find to lead the opposition was a known hate group. And now with DOMA, same thing. Unsurprisingly, the same groups have said things about ENDA as well. I'm sure when that becomes a national priority again the media will ask those hate groups what they think about employment discrimination protections for LGBTs.
The National Organization for Marriage, who has quoted one of the listed hate groups approvingly, is allowed to speak for opposition to marriage for gays in general. They've waged offensive and hurtful antigay campaigns all over the country and have inserted themselves into huge legal battles over marriage. When the FRC was listed as a hate group, NOM came to their defense and attacked the SPLC:
“This is about protecting marriage,” Brown said. “This isn't about being anti-anyone. The whole idea that somehow those folks who stand up for traditional marriage, like the Family Research Council, are hateful is wrong. [The law center is] trying to marginalize and intimidate folks for standing up for marriage and also trying to equate them somehow with the KKK.”
But you won't see NOM referred to by the media as anything other than an honest group who just doesn't want to see the definition of marriage changed. That's all, really. Nothing to worry about.
If people in the media are genuinely interested in furthering the conversation and not just presenting two opposite stories in an already slanted reality, they should start by telling their readers just who is being allowed to comment on current events within their articles. If you want to present a hate group's side of the story, do it, but don't fucking lie to your audience. Tell them it's a hate group and you just needed to hear the bigot's side, you know, for fairness' sake.