I'm all for gay rights -- or LGBTQI rights as we're supposed to call gay right now. And that's not because "some of my best friends are gay," but because I think that gay rights are consistent with a human rights advocacy position of "all human rights for all." I don't think gay rights are conditional. But I do think they have to be fought for as a matter of law, not as a matter of tribal enforcement of authoritarianism.
Gay rights don't exist as full-fledged rights in national or international law. When we invoke them, we aren't invoking inherencies but trying to apply the notion of equality to gay persons and extend the "self-evident" nature of them. But gay rights are making progress, to be sure, and awareness continues to be raised. Under the Obama Administration, the US government has made gay equality a staple of its international human rights foreign policy, although Obama has not gone so far as to deman a federal gay rights law that would include marriage rights.
Unlike Rachel Maddow, who is on a poster with a quotation making the rounds of Facebook now, I don't believe that "rights are rights, you don't have to vote on them" because, well, they aren't. It would be nice if they were. It would be nice if there were awareness when the Constitution was drafted, and when Supreme Court decisions came later in the next centuries, that there was recognition that gay rights are equal rights. But just as rights for women and blacks took some decades in coming and had to be fought for, so do rights for gays. That's sad; it should happen faster; it should be self-evident like all the other truths held self-evident.
But it isn't, and I do not believe that the way to get it to be so is to become oppressive, coercive, and undermining of others' rights. Racial and gender equality didn't come by taking others' rights to free speech and association away -- those rights in fact are needed to right for all human rights for all. And I don't believe that gay rights will come about by taking away the rights of others antithetical to gays. The resulting society is one in which thuggishness and not the rule of law obtains. I'm against it.
As I wrote before at length, after a long time of thinking, I am really, really troubled by the aggressive, nasty, hateful, bullying tone of some elements of the gay rights struggle. I have experienced this up close and personal merely because I challenged the idea, promoted by Dan Savage, that if we recognize gay marriage rights, we also have to accept that marriage should mean promiscuity. I really don't see how one has to include the other, and it helps me realize that the gay marriage rights movement has elements of artifice and stealth -- it's really about another agenda for some, which should more properly be called "gay power" like "black power," Black Panther style, which involves crushing your enemies, even with violence, but certainly with harassment and boycotts and intimidation.
I wrote there about a lot of the people I see reluctant to sign off on gay rights and who even vote against them:
It's not that they are intolerant as much as that they fear the undermining of their own valuations and values by people antithetical to them. They feel they are getting a bad bargain -- a demand of tolerance from them for lifestyles they don't condone, but not a reciprocity of tolerance for their own choices.
There just doesn't seem to be an inherent awareness -- and validation and acceptance -- of the fact that other people get to have their views about traditional marriage; they get to advocate them; they get to spend money on organizations advocating them; those organizations get to lobby and advertise and hold events.
Unless you can actually show that any of this activity led to *discrimination* against gays, or actual coercion or violence, you don't have a case. This is America. The First Amendment holds. You can't silence people's views with the threat of state power.
Yet that's exactly what seems to have happened with the chick-fil-A case. Today comes news that this chicken fast-food company has buckled after a tide of social media hate and real-world boycotts and actions against them, and ceased its funding of organizations that are deemed "anti-gay".
That's disturbing for all of us, because it means that instead of achieving gay rights through affirmation of rights for all, it is involving taking away the free speech of some under coercion. That undermines freedom for all of us. It's wrong.
To be sure, the story is already being questioned, because the statement doesn't come from Chik-fila-A itself, but from the gay organization pressuring them to change. So it bears checking and we need to hear what the facts are here.
In Chicago, Obama's crony Rahm Emmanuel, who left the White House to become mayor, said that he would bar the restaurant chain from Chicago. That was really progs gone wild. It was bad enough that the engineered boycott of Chik-fil-A may have actually harmed their business; it was bad enough that the pressure of the hate campaign may have led to the Chik-fil-A VP for public relations dying of a heart attack. But now the power of public office was going to be used to curb speech and association. That's really frightening. A number of public figures, including even talk show hosts, weighed in with how wrong it was to bar a business from a municipality just for their views as expressed in the media.
Then what seems to have kicked in were some private negotiations, where the organized gay rights movement in Chicago, the Civil Rights Agenda, in conjunction with a sympathetic alderman, Proco "Joe" Moreno, somehow entered into talks or correspondence with Chik-fil-A. The chicken people have an ideology that their entire business can be a "Christian business" whereby everything they do can be devoted to God. They use the proceeds of their business for holding retreats on strengthening the family -- by which they mean the family as conceived as one man and one woman, and one woman under the man and one man under God.
But the main beef the organized gays had with the fast-food franchise was that the proceeds of their profits in this Christian business were going to anti-gay organizations. This aspect of the story was invoked again and again in forums, where people claimed not to be against free speech, but they *were* against funding organization that they said "wanted to take gays' rights from them."
Well, sorry, but free speech *does* including funding organizations that advocate views antithetical to yours. That's free and protected speech too. You can morally denounce it -- and of course that's being done with vigour and even hate and venom. And no, I'm not for taking *your* rights away and saying "you can't do that" or "you can't do just what they're doing" and denounce them, advocate for boycotts, hold actions, etc. etc. (within the law, i.e. I don't think you get to disrupt traffic and the use of the restaurant by other patrons in civil disobedience over this without consequences of arrest).
So what the Civil Rights Agenda did was enter into "months" of negotiations to try to browbeat Chik-fil-A -- under threat of having a Chicago official pull their business permit to open new restaurants on them! -- until finally, they got the executives of Chik-fil-A to write an internal memo affirming that they would ""treat every person with honor, dignity and respect-regardless of their beliefs, race, creed, sexual orientation and gender" in their restaurants and apparently cease funding "anti-gay" organizations. That part is unclear because we're not hearing it from Truett Cathy, the Chick-fil-A founder himself or any other chicken executives -- just from those pressuring them.
The story was consistent with another rumour in Huffpo that Dan Cathy, another executive in the family business, held some kind of "diversity" talks on the Duke University campus because Duke threatened not to renew their contract with the restaurant. It's likely that the Cathys simply practiced good business -- they are, after all, a business before they are an advocacy group -- and decided to meet and try to figure out what their antagonizers' beef was. No doubt they saw themselves as "clarifying" their position to show they weren't openly anti-gay as a matter of discrimination against restaurant patrons. Perhaps they conceded that they should get out of the "family" organization funding business because it was too controversial, and not consistent with their claim that they would stay out of the political arena, and let others pursue policy debates. Most likely it was business prudence -- the sort that boycotters always hope they can trigger -- that got Chik-Fil-A to decide to back off on some of their "traditional family" advocacy. It would be interesting to hear how they arrived at this position.
But they only arrived at it through force and business loss, and I don't view that as progress. It won't stick. It can and does cause backlash. And it doesn't strengthen the rule of law. Instead, it strengthens gangland style tactics to shakedown businesses that some groups in society don't like by taking away their rights.
And let me emphasize once again that my criticism of the gay movement's tactics and their politicking and even thuggishness on this, in cahoots with "progressive" elected officials, isn't taking away their right to advocate as they do. It's not denying them the right to practice such tactics consistent with the First Amendment. It's about morally calling out their coerciveness and pointing out that it leads to sham victories and doesn't strengthen in the end all human rights for all.
Every time you criticize the left's take on anything these days, they immediately petulantly claim you are "taking away their free speech". Huh? They're the ones taking away free speech, and I'm not advocating taking theirs away. They can have boycotts; they can shriek and holler on social media; they can sic their elected officials on hated fast food outfits to their hearts' content. But I can also call out the moral dubiousness of these tactics as well.
I saw that David Badash at the blog New Civil Rights was taking on the next round in this debate. Interestingly, Badash is the same blogger who took on Dan Savage's views of open marriage as ill-advised at a time when the gay rights movement was trying to make progress on marriage rights in many states. I had "liked" that article when linked by a former friend on Facebook, and had then faced a tidal wave of hate from the fuck-you hedonist gay set who want to thuggishly silence anyone who opposes them with bullying.
Yet I was disappointed to see that Badash, who seems sane and thoughtful, took the path that so many progs are taking these days of "factology" and "illustrating how everyone got the facts wrong".
I was eager to see what exactly he came up with in that "op research" approach, and read it very carefully. But I didn't see any of the facts of the media wrong, and I didn't change my position, shared by CNN journalists as well as all kinds of public figures chastizing the gay movement for implying Chik-fil-A can't have free speech and is to be punished by blocking of their business permits over their beliefs as expressed. If the liberal consensus that holds this country's freedoms together really prevailed, the Chicago and Boston officials would back off and give Chik-fil-A their permits and merely watch to see if they really had a genuine discrimination case. Citizens would be free not to patronage them. Yet something different is happening, not good for rights in general.
Badash gets away from the immediate problem of Truett Cathy's First Amendment rights by re-focusong on what is seen as a more ominous problem with Chik-Fil-A: the anti-gay organizations they fund which are viewed as actively advocating discrimination against gays. He even implies that the restaurant itself has discrimated against gays, but his reporting then gets vague. He digs up the fact that since 1988, the chain had 12 discrimination cases. Really, David? That's all? That's a very small number for any large business with tens of thousands of employees. We don't even know if these are about gay rights at all; they could be about gender or racial discrimination. And we don't even know if they are accurate; disgruntled employees play the politically-correct card of claiming discrimination, and maybe they're wrong. If there's a case, bring it. I don't see it.
Should Chik-fil-A be able to reject gay employees due to its founders' views against gay marriage? It would seem the law would not allow them to do that, because they are a business, and not a private club. The courts ruled in favour of the Boy Scouts of America, saying that they have the right to bar gays from their ranks as a matter of freedom of assocation -- that right isn't trumped by freedom of expression. But they might not hold the same notion under most municipalities' jurisprudence on labor law. This is admittedly a fine line and it would have to be tested in court. So far I don't see the smoking gun David Badash does.
But his real complaint, as with other gay advocates, is about the even more conservative outfits that WinShape, their philanthropical arm, supports.
I took a careful look at all the organizations he was complaining about. Naturally, I don't support any of them. But supporting them with speech and money isn't an offense, and is protected activity under the First Amendment.
Exodus International and other groups that advocate that you can make people drop their gayness through therapy or religious experience seem silly when they aren't horrifying. Exodus seems to self-discredit by the fact that two of their founders who claimed to be de-gayified then dropped out and lived with each other until one died of AIDS. The current leadership seems to have to do some tap-dancing to explain how they don't believe in fact gays can be "converted" with overnight miracles as they once claimed. They don't seem to be backing off from their recruitment of gays back to the straight world -- which is folly -- but I don't see any evidence that they use coercion. I don't see them holding people against their will with cult-like techniques. People seem to leave them freely. And under the First Amendment and other Constitutional rights, *they get to have these programs*. They are lawful. They are obnoxious and even sickening. Why go against people's actual natures? But unless you can show they've broken a law, you cannot undermine their basic rights. They are the same basic rights you need to stand on.
I recall on a forum somebody claimed wildly to me that one of the organizations that Chik-fil-A supports was for "exporting gays from the US". Gosh, that sounded awful. Export? Really, guys? Like round up and deport? Even if they are citizens? How? To where?
It turned out that what *that* meant was that some of these traditional family groups advocated against allowing the partners of gays or the spouses of gays married in other countries that recognize gay marriage at the national level to obtain immigration status. Well, if there isn't a federal law acknowledging gay marriage, then that right can't be extended to immigrants. This is pretty much of an edge case, of course and fairly contrived -- what, gay couples married in Norway are going to immigrate to the US and one of them isn't going to be accepted? Could we look at some actual cases, please?
It may seem harsh, but if you don't have gay rights, you don't have the extensions of gay rights that are implied in laws on immigration, and you have to fight for them, not accuse people who advocate against them falsely that they are for murder and deportation. If you think you achieve something by browbeating and shaming them, you don't. And you don't have a case.
Badash mentions another group, the SPLC:
The intention is to denigrate LGBT people in its battles against same-sex marriage, hate crimes laws, anti-bullying programs and the repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.
To make the case that the LGBT community is a threat to American society, the FRC employs a number of “policy experts” whose “research” has allowed the FRC to be extremely active politically in shaping public debate. Its research fellows and leaders often testify before Congress and appear in the mainstream media. It also works at the grassroots level, conducting outreach to pastors in an effort to “transform the culture.”
That all sounds scary and ominous, but the reality is, its protected, lawful speech and activity. They may advocate these awful backward things, but your case against them -- that we must silence them and even boycott or refuse to give permits to their business -- is pretty much undermined by the fact that they don't have an effect. Obama repealed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and replaced it with a policy allowing gays in the military. Some gays have even been married on some military bases. Good!
If you don't want LGBT to be viewed as a "threat to American society" -- its freedoms, its rights -- then don't undermine those freedoms and rights, extend them instead. That's what the president did.
Another wild claim on forums involved Uganda, and statements that these groups backed the killing of gays. I looked at the various websites and again, found this a wild exaggeration. They just didn't support Congressional action or a State Department policy supporting gays in Uganda or protesting their murder. That's reprehensible -- they should get behind such statements of basic human rights. But again, it's their First Amendment right to advocate against such bills, and advocating against the acknowledgement of gay rights that they imply, and pointing out that those gay rights don't exist, isn't advocating murder, or even "incitement to imminent violence". It's saying that they advocate against gay rights. They get to do that. Stop trying to take away their rights; they are your own rights.
In making his deeper case against Chik-fil-A based on not just public statements but groups they fund, Badash concludes by saying the lion's share of their funding goes to their own programs, and then cites their core message:
“What would happen if companies developed effective practices and benefits to grow the relational wellness of their employees; the faith community delivered stronger marriage and family ministries; great media with a winsome, honest message to the culture about marriage and the family saturated our cities; marriage and family service providers collaborated to share their expertise in producing a new generation of amazing resources and services; and city leaders and elders took responsibility for overlapping these efforts within their own community? We believe that a renaissance of marriage and family in America would take place!”
Sorry, but there's nothing wrong with this statement as such, although the smarmy Bible smugness is offensive. It's not only about the First Amendment, which this doesn't cross; it's about a conflation of the idea that support for traditional marriage equals anti-gay activity. The gay rights movement is on shaky ground when they make this shrill and unfounded claim. And even if it is anti-gay, it is protected speech and association, and the way to fight it is not through challenging those rights.
Badash seems to imply that if the chicken people succeed in their dreams, and "saturate" America, they will fill a civil space so full of born-again traditional family types antithetical to the gay lifestyle that they will pose a threat to gay freedom. If that "winsome" messaging succeeds, the world will be filled with 1950s heterogenous church-going couples making jello surprises.
But that's ludicruous. It's just a chicken restaurant. It's just one non-profit advocacy group among many. The concerted power of all the gay nonprofits likely dwarf the conservative groups they oppose. There is no danger that born-again style Christian values are going to prevail in the major urban areas of America, or even in many lesser backwaters. Yeah, I get it about the "red belt" or the "Bible belt." But do you REAALY think you will win those people over by saying they all must be brow-beaten out of their views and their charities of choice by Shakedown Street from the organized gay mafia?
Because that's what it sounds like. It sounds exactly like the sort of thing the Rev. Jesse Jackson and his cronies did in the 1980s, so perfectly exposed by the liberal New Yorker. They would start a boycott against a company claiming it discriminated against blacks, and perhaps it didn't truly have many blacks on staff. Then they would offer to "resolve" the problem by having some "training" and some consultants come in to do sensitivity sessions with executives. This, of course, would cost a lot of money, and Jackson's consulting companies would make a fortune. I find this appalling, because instead of regulating by law, and claiming rights by law, it implies that you can gain privileges by paying tribute to the right people. It's wrong. It undermines the rule of law.
Now the argument might come: But what if the chicken people really were threatening to take over the civic space? At what point do you stop conceding that people have their free speech rights and say now they are so encroaching that they take away yours?
Well, you do that when you have an actual case. And you don't. What you have is the opposite. Chicago alderman making a deal with a gay rights lobby to let in the much-harassed restaurant if they back down from the exercise of their rights. You have Emmanuel talking about "Chicago values" and not rights, although there isn't anything in the Constitution called "Chicago values," so it really becomes something that's gangland style -- achieved by coercion. The job of the movement should be to fight for rights and persuade people who are doubtful or hostile that gays deserve equality like any other human beings -- by showing indeed they are like any other human beings. That demands the same kind of reason that is expected of people asked to change -- and not coercion, and not withdrawal of rights.
Badash jumps from the Chik-Fil-A's statement "“You can’t expect people to do well in their business if they’ve got problems at home" to implying that he has made an anti-gay statement by saying "You also can’t expect people to do well in their business if they know their boss disagrees with the very essence of their being, and is willing to publicly state they would fire them for being gay" -- but without any linkage whatsoever. Advocating for traditional marriage and advocating even against gay rights explicitly (which these conservative groups don't do in the way implied) isn't the same thing as firing a gay employee.
If there is a case, please come up with it. There isn't. And if a gay person knowingly goes to Chik-fil-A to get a job there and broadcast his lifestyle to get in their face as an experiment, he's going to pick a contrived fight. He's not Rosa Parks on a public bus. He's making a private decision to go work in a private company where he doesn't have to work because it isn't the only job in town.
Another case took place recently in Canada, which tends to have the ability to be more politically-correct than the US because there is less of a private sector there and many more people working for the government or funded by the government. The government funds more things and has more power to force its views subtly or not. In this case, an Hispanic ball player on a baseball team had painted some anti-gay slurs under eyes that were visible during the game. It amounted to saying to the rival team, "You're faggots". This was indeed offense and a baseball team, which is a public institution that is supposed to be about good sportsmanship and fair play, shouldn't allow it, regardless of any free speech norms in Canada or anywhere. The players are looked to as role models especially for children and should be expected to comport themselves decently. It's not decent to paint that kind of slur. In fact, any kind of banner about anything in the eye paint seems out of line.
So what was this fellow's punishment for not realizing the environment he was in was not supportive of Latin American machismo and rampant Latino anti-gay sentiment -- or even the casual insults that the modern youth indulges in almost as an instinctual rebellion against their years of politically-correct training? He is to be benched for three games, and his pay is to go to a gay rights' organization, and he is to undergo sensitivity training. Some consultants will pocket the fee; the groups will be gleeful at their windfall. Instead of a rights-based approach, we have tribal bribery.
I find this truly appalling -- because it's not about gay rights, it's not about rights for us all, it's about an excessively punitive approach that does not achieve rights, but only achieves intimidation. Do we really think this ball player will emerge after his docked pay and his "sensitivity training" transformed and loving of gay people? Will he not simmer with resentment and will not scores of his fellow players -- and fans -- feel as if they've been on Shakedown Street?
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