Friday, May 1, 2015

When the stigmata's on the other foot, and other nice ironies of the conservative antigay machine

The hilarity of the times takes many forms, and much defective and deceptive reasoning.

Over the last twenty years, I have been handed my head more than once by African-American leaders who took offense at references likening the gay right movement to some aspect- usually in terms of equal protection analysis in constitutional law. No way is what you people deal with like what we did, they'd say.

And, at a factual level, their responses were not without merit. No one went looking for free labor among the 17th and 18th century black homosexuals of Africa, after all. As for "waking up black every day," another common trope, well..some do, and some don't in the gay tribe.

A previous generation of conservatives despised Martin Luther King, Jr. and the movement he led; their slow, steady resegregation of public schools- by withdrawing from them into private, white, schools, is one manifestation. Nowadays, they embrace Dr. King's rhetoric even as their advocacy groups litigate to undo the reach of the Civil Rights Acts. Mike Huckabee was early to this rodeo: in 2008 he said gays could not claim they were part of a civil rights movement until they got their heads cracked in like the blacks did.

Now, of course, he peddles the line that gays have bulked up in the gym, going from the namby-pambies of the hair salons and florist shops to "homofascists" bullying others into submission. Or- his mind is rarely far from the larder- that without the right to discriminate, Christian cake martyrs will be reduced to the status of eating bacon-wrapped shrimp.

Now, having fought the good- and well-funded- fight for a quarter century, the antigays are realizing they have lost public opinion. What's more, thy are being called out for the hate and animus they have spewed, and the discriminatory legislation they now champion.

And they don't like it a bit.

So it's perfectly reasonable- if, at the same time, risible- that white Southern male conservatives seeing their biggest fundraising "other" morphing into the couples who keep their yards up and actually adopt unwanted kids instead of going on about keeping others from doing it while not doing it oneself.

Thus we get Todd Starnes, who, here, explains how he is the new face of the civil rights movement:




And here is Maggie Gallagher, who has risen from an unknown, angry woman to a famous, wealthy, angry woman demonizing gays, finds her whole reason for being is being, itself, rejected by the vast public she was certain would make her She Who Must Be Obeyed.

And she doesn't like it a bit either.

She has posted an open letter to Justice Anthony Kennedy, asking him to rescue her from being one of the "newly stigmatized" by handing her back her power to stigmatize others.

The ironies pile. This the Facebook fanpages for Barronelle Stutzman and Aaron & Melissa Klein fulminate, how dare Gofundme.com shut down their highly lucrative crowdfunded welfare operations. They demand that it continue to give them access for they can make money being martyrs for wanting to deny other people access to their businesses. God is the ultimate tie-breaker in such arguments. They were happy for you to know how fast they were raking in the pelf when they had gofundme accounts; now; reduced to sheltering under the wing of Franklin Graham (who just signed a laughable pledge to defy a Supreme Court ruling on marriage if they don't like it), they have gotten all secretive. I have asked- three times- at Barronelle Stutzman's Facebook page, how much she is getting (on top of the $173,000 her gofundme page raised) from Memories Pizza, whose owners said last month they will share their $842,000 haul with her. No answer.

And I have asked how much the Kleins made before they were shut down, and how much since. How close are you to making your penalty? They won't say, either.

Both have a lot of self-victim talk, though. They are martyrs, after all, and when martyrdom starts to exact its price, it sure is nice to be able to erase that worry asking others to make your bail.

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