And I quote...
In an effort to gain passage of Barney Frank's Employment Non-Discrimination Act Of 2007 (ENDA), Rep. Pelosi has urged homo-transgender activists to bombard the offices of 50 Democrats who refuse to make cross-dressers, transsexuals, drag queens and she-males as federally-protected classes.
Yes. That's what he said. "Homo-transgender activists." But wait! There's more!
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) has promised to unleash 700,000 homosexual-drag queen/she-male activists upon Congress during the next two weeks in order to gain passage of Frank's "gender identity"-inclusive version.
The letter also refers to Frank and Pelosi as "(D-MoveOn.org)"
I'll say this much for him: he knows his target audience.
But here's the thing...
Sheldon's been pulling this sort of crap for a long time now-- to him, we're all freaks of nature who should be sent into a mental institution. Which, of course, in his world fits, because the DSM lists 30 deviances tied in with homosexuality. But what happens when you look at that list? It includes (and I quote again):
Apotemnophilia - sexual arousal associated with the stump(s) of an
amputee... Telephone Scatalogia - sexual arousal associated with making or receiving obscene phone calls... Urophilia - sexual arousal associated with urine...
In other words, the "Reverend" Lou Sheldon makes a point of lumping all of his alleged "deviances" together as evidence about how deviant homosexuality is, and then justifying it by saying that homosexuality is deviant, therefore it's like these other sexual deviances.
I don't think I'd want to live in his brain. It's a scary, small, and disturbing place. I also suspect there's some mold.
But I digress... I posted this because, as far as the most virulent enemies of progress go, it doesn't matter whether we include transgenderism or not. We're all freakish she-male queer lesbian transvestite drag queen freaks of freakishness, out to freakishly destroy society. We're not human beings in his eyes. We're sick, diseased, filth and it's all the same to him.
In the meantime, we've got rational conservatives (Democrat and Republican) who are nervous about voting for ENDA because they're worried about backlash from people like Sheldon.
The backlash will be the same whether they support an ENDA with or without gender identity protections. We need to find ways to effectively communicate this to these legislators. I truly believe that if they're able to be educated about GLB issues, they can be educated about gender identity as well.
I just don't think that Barney Frank is the right person to be explaining this to them right now. It's just not something he seems to understand well enough to do the job and I'm not yet convinced that we have a strong ally for this perspective in the house.
That said, I think that once we can get people to make the leap to respecting people's right to be lesbian, gay or bi, it's not that hard a leap to convince them that gender identity is something they should learn to respect as well. My view is that most of this isn't so much them thinking "Oh, I'm okay with gay people, but those crazy trannies can go to hell." I think it's most of them just not even knowing what it's about and reacting with discomfort to things that are foreign to them (they're politicians-- it's their job to react with discomfort to foreign ideas) and worrying about the affect this will have on their political careers.
The former is just a matter of giving them the right sort of education. The latter is just showing them the letter from Lou Sheldon and saying "look, he's going to hate you no matter what you do if you support either of these bills. You might as well support the real one."
I think we've got a shot at making ENDA into something real and positive, even if it doesn't make it through this time around.
Hell, even losing the fight in a very public way is important, because one of our big enemies right now is that a lot of younger people don't realize that it's not illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.
Even losing this fight educates the public, especially if we lose it on the right battle.
