BY ED SIKOV | “The other reason the gay rights movement appears to have adopted a one-sided political approach is that its leaders seem to think that they simply do not need Republican support. Although Americans, and Republicans in particular, have been increasingly tolerant toward the LGBTQ community — with Donald Trump specifically name-checking the movement at the 2016 Republican National Convention — the gay rights movement has generally preferred to fight its cause in the courts rather than appealing to the goodwill of voters.”
The next time you feel faint when standing up, try the Breitbart method for returning your low blood pressure to its normally astronomical level. (Every sane person has hypertension these days; the times demand it. And I just heard of a new syndrome called the Trump 10 – the poundage people are putting on overeating due to Trump anxiety.) Breitbart is at its worst when it feigns reasonability. The article from whence this quotation spewed was written for Breitbart by Joel B. Pollak, a South Africa-born straight guy who serves as a senior editor at large for the noxious website.
“Republicans in particular have been increasingly tolerant toward the LGBTQ community,” he asserts.
That’s because going from 0 to 1 is a gigantic step forward when seen in isolation; it’s only when you learn that there are many numbers after 1 that you realize how tiny that initial step is. I suggest that Pollak take a quick look at an article on Time.com titled “As a Gay Republican, I Cannot Defend the GOP Platform.” Written by James Richardson, a former spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, the article goes a long way toward explaining why we find the Republican Party to be, shall we say, a little bit hostile to us.
PERSPECTIVE: Media Circus
As Richardson explains, “It designates pornography a ‘public health crisis,’ because masturbation is a transcendent threat to American wellness that obviously must be addressed. It supports so-called sexual conversion therapy for minors, even as every mainstream mental health and medical organization discredited the repugnant practice decades earlier. It marks children reared in a ‘traditional two-parent household’ as inherently superior to those reared outside the ‘Leave It to Beaver’ dynamic, even as reputable science demonstrates otherwise.”
Moreover, Richardson writes, “The committee separately rejected a positively mild resolution designed only to encourage dialogue on the virtue of same-sex marriage, even a year after the United States Supreme Court affirmed the fundamental right of every American to wed the person of their choosing…. It would be easier to defend the belief that earth is the center of the universe than some of the nonsense installed as official party dogma for the next four years.”
None of this troubles Pollak in the slightest. He leaves out the fact that Chump selected Mike Pence, probably the most anti-gay politician since Jesse Helms, to be his running mate. Pence has become the only reason to be against impeachment.
And according to Pollak, what is the first reason why the LGBTQ community tends overwhelmingly to support Democrats?
“One is that the movement has run out of great causes for which to fight. With the Supreme Court’s June 2015 discovery of a right to gay marriage in the US Constitution, the gay rights movement has little left to achieve. It has poured energy and resources into the new cause of transgender rights, but that is a deeply complicated issue that affects a tiny percentage of Americans.”
Note the dig in the second sentence — the court’s “discovery of a right to gay marriage” in the Constitution, as if the notion of equal protection was a recent concoction.
His contempt for trans folks couldn’t be more pronounced. True, the percentage of the population who are trans may be small, but the “issue” affects us all. Pollak was born in the country that invented and sustained apartheid; maybe he could be a little more sensitive to issues of civil rights for all people. And anyway, if the “issue” affects only “a tiny percentage of Americans,” then why do Republicans make such a big deal about bathroom use?
“America’s Top Hypocrites Are Meeting at the Trump White House For Technology Week” is the headline of a hilarious piece on Gizmodo.com by Matt Novak, who certainly doesn’t pull any punches.
“America’s largest tech companies made a big, public fuss after President Trump vowed to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord earlier this month,” he writes. “But top executives from many of those same companies are meeting with members of the Trump regime this week. Who needs principles when there’s money to be made?
“Yes, this week is officially Technology Week at the White House. And while the list of cowards meeting with Trump has been kept pretty quiet by the technology companies themselves, we now have a better idea of who will be kissing Trump’s ass. And virtually all of the usual suspects will be there.
“Axios has a list of the technology industry collaborators that will be in Washington, DC, for meetings held today and on Thursday. Some people like IBM’s Ginni Rometty have been longtime Trump allies, unapologetic in their support for Trump. Others, like Apple CEO Tim Cook, have pretended like they’re outraged with President Trump in public, but continued to work with him behind closed doors.”
In addition to Rometty and Cook, other boldface technology leaders due to attend include Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, OpenGov’s Zachary Bookman, and Alphabet’s Eric Schmidt, who spent his Sunday in Manhattan thumping his Google subsidiary chest over giving $1 million in support of the Stonewall National Monument, for which the LGBT Community Center will develop a digital narrative history of the 1969 Rebellion’s central place in queer history.
Novak offers his explanation for some many seemingly right-thinking people collaborating with Trump in this way:
“So why do tech CEOs continue to meet with a regime that’s pushing the US further into an authoritarian dystopia with each passing day? Because there’s no downside for them. They need lucrative contracts with the government and will continue to meet with the Trump regime because they’re feeling absolutely no pressure from the American public to change their ways. Meanwhile, people of principle are dropping from the Trump regime like flies. Six members of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) resigned over the weekend in protest, saying that Trump ‘has no strategy to address the on-going HIV/AIDS epidemic.’”
One of the now-former members is reported to have said, “Trump simply does not care” about HIV/AIDS.
Is anyone surprised?
Anyone?
