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As part of the never-ending rewriting of history that seems soldered into the genes of some self-proclaimed “woke” lefties, the largest victory in LGBT rights history — marriage equality — is now a sign of all that is wrong with the gays.
In a piece in Buzzfeed today, Shannon Keating explained how marriage equality (evil) got us Pete Buttigieg (even more evil) and how all our progressive dreams will now end up on the ash heap of history all because we let the gays marry.
Jerry Falwell couldn’t have said it better.
It’s difficult to know where to begin with Keating’s argument. It’s a long article that is part of a larger repertoire of woke anti-gay literature of late in the mainstream straight press. (Straight media really has a thing for gay writers bashing fellow gays. And while Fox News came up with the dynamic decades ago, it’s the straight mainstream publications who have raised it to an art form of late.)
But it didn’t start there. Some on the far left have long hated mainstream gay, now LGBT, politics. The idea of fighting for the right to marry, or join the military, was anathema to the fringes of LGBT activism. Some called these “white men’s issues,” even though the first gay couple married in DC was black and lesbian. For others, the notion of fighting to join the institutions of our oppressors was simply too “mainstream” — who wants to be like the heteros, after all? And in any case, this crowd never wanted to marry or join the Marines anyway, so why should they fight for someone else’s right to join two institutions they loathe?
Which takes us back to Pete Buttigieg biggest “problem” for this crowd: He’s a white gay man, and not, in Keating’s own words, “your typical orgy-attending, polyamorous Brooklyn bottom queen.” Keating devotes an awful lot of time to the fact of Buttigieg’s maleness, whiteness, and his Christian faith. It seems to really bother her. And that too is telling. Understandably, a lot of gays have issues with religion, having grown up in families who turned against them because of faith. So I get that. But lots of other LGBT people are people of faith, and their beliefs deserve just much respect as the atheists and agnostics. (Keating also fails to even acknowledge that faith is potentially one hell of a political weapon when wielded by a Democrat, let alone a gay one.)
Pete’s other “problem,” that he’s a gay white man, has deep roots in the woker-than-thou left. Lots of newer LGBT activists have outright animus towards white gay men, claiming, among other things, that white gay men never did anything for the LGBT movement when, in many cases, they carried the lion’s share of the activist burden, including sacrificing their lives.
The final, and larger point, underlying Keating’s broadside against Buttigieg is that she, like many on the left fringe, would rather the LGBT rights movement not focus on LGBT rights at all. They’ve long tried to hijack LGBT groups for their own non-gay non-bi non-lesbian and non-trans policy goals, from immigration to poverty to the conflict in the Middle East. All important issues, to be sure, but we have lots of groups and advocates already working on them, and just as importantly, they’re not LGBT issues. It’s fine for LGBT groups to join and support larger progressive coalitions on various non-LGBT issues, and they do, but these activists would rather we jettison LGBT issues entirely, and instead devote our entire movement to everyone else’s cause but our own.
Here’s Keating in her own words: “Where Buttigieg has fallen short in queer leftists’ eyes, however, is on issues that don’t necessarily have an obvious connection to LGBTQ rights, but nonetheless radically impact the lives of LGBTQ people, like health care, housing, and education.”
As someone who has been working on LGBT rights at the national level for over a quarter of a century, I’m all too familiar with the everything-but-gay crowd — the people who think the only way to advance LGBT rights is not to work on our issues at all. But what they’re practicing isn’t wokeness, it’s cultural appropriation. They’ve witnessed the remarkable success of the LGBT rights movement, and they want some of that mojo for their own non-LGBT pet cause. In Keating’s case, health care, housing and education. And far easier than replicating our success is to simply steal it.
(And before anyone argues, as some have, that immigration, for example, is an LGBT issue because 3% of immigrants are LGBT, then Trump’s tax cuts for the rich are an LGBT issue because 3% of the rich are LGBT. It’s a specious argument by which every issue ends up LGBT, and thereby, none.)
All the while, ENDA (the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, banning job discrimination against LGBT people under federal law), goes nowhere. And the Equality Act (an omnibus LGBT civil rights act that incorporates ENDA, public accommodations, and other protections), relatively new legislation that is now gaining momentum, is all but an after-thought to Keating and her post-LGBT brethren.
In the end, Shannon Keating thinks Pete Buttigieg is a bad gay because it helps her cause. A cause that unfortunately has little to do with advancing the civil rights of actual LGBT people.
The post Pete Buttigieg is a bad gay? Here we go again. appeared first on AMERICAblog News.
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