Hate By Any Other Name

Today we have a guest post from Peace Tree Contributing author, Patricia Goldsmith.

Hate By Any Other Name

Larry Kramer was one of the very first people to recognize the AIDS epidemic for what it was. While the Reagan administration refused to acknowledge the burgeoning epidemic and gay men didn’t want to believe it, Kramer helped found the legendary group ACT-UP, whose motto was Silence=Death.

Twenty years later, Larry Kramer has re-ignited ACT-UP to wake us up to another grim reality we’d rather not face. “The needs are different now. Then it was AIDS, and now” he says, “it is utter sheer hate hurled at us right and left.”

As blunt and confrontational as ever, Kramer began an open letter to straight people in the Los Angeles Times with the question, “Why do you hate gay people so much?” Put another way, why do those who claim to hate the sin but love the sinner often seem, instead, to love the hate but hate the h word.

For example, when former NBA player Tim Hardaway came right out and said, “I hate gay people,” Concerned Women for America immediately issued a press release condemning not his bigotry but his language:

Hardaway’s comments are both unfortunate and inappropriate. They provide political fodder for those who wish to paint all opposition to the homosexual lifestyle as being rooted in “hate.” It’s important to note that Hardaway’s words represent the feelings of Hardaway. His words do not represent the feelings of the vast majority of people opposed to the homosexual agenda. ... Thousands of former homosexuals have been freed from the homosexual lifestyle through acts of love. Hardaway’s comments only serve to foment misperceptions of widespread homosexual “victimhood” which the homosexual lobby has craftily manufactured. [from Matt Barber of Concerned Women for America in a press release dated 2-16-07, as quoted in The Advocate, March 27, 2007, print edition, page 52]

It’s funny how much “hate” feels like the real thing when you’re on the receiving end.

Maintaining an emotional disconnect from the pain they inflict is crucial to the anti-gay project. It’s a hard balancing act to pull off, particularly these days, when it seems that the right is running on nothing but fumes and hate. The media seem to think it’s enough to ban the use of the word faggot.

By that reckoning, General Peter Pace’s recent statement that gays should not be allowed to serve in the military because homosexuality is immoral should be no big deal; after all, he didn’t use any naughty words. And yet somehow one feels the hate is there. Former Senator Alan Simpson, Republican from Wyoming, lays it out in a piece for the Washington Post entitled “Bigotry That Hurts Our Military”:

According to the Government Accountability Office, more than 300 language experts have been fired under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” including more than 50 who are fluent in Arabic. This when even Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice recently acknowledged the nation’s “foreign language deficit” and how much our government needs Farsi and Arabic speakers. Is there a “straight” way to translate Arabic? Is there a “gay” Farsi? My God, we’d better start talking sense before it is too late. . . .

To fill its needs, the Army is granting a record number of “moral waivers,” allowing even felons to enlist. Yet we turn away patriotic gay and lesbian citizens.

Peter Pace would rather recruit criminals who would otherwise be sitting in prison than retain highly qualified -- even indispensable -- LGBT personnel under his command. You can call that General Pace’s religion or his personal opinion. You can even call it love if you have the nerve, but it’s hatred all the same.

Pace’s bigotry has proved somewhat awkward, since it lays him open, at the very least, to charges of serious managerial incompetence, but it’s exactly the kind of divisiveness the rightwing political blogosphere glories in. Consider, for example, this posting by Mike Adams on Townhall.com, regarding the suggestion that, as with the n word, only gay people can use the word faggot without giving offense:

This is an unspeakable insult to black people. Gay persecution does not rival black persecution in the annals (I could not find a better word to insert here) of American history. Any assertion to the contrary is simply too queer to take seriously.

The distinction between racial and gay prejudice is wholly artificial. In real life, hate runs roughshod over such careful (and clever: “annals” looks like “anal” and then you “insert,” get it?) boundaries. For example, when a black man named Corey Andrew recently told Army recruiter Sgt. Marcia Ramode that he was gay, this is where she went (via email):

GO BACK TO AFRICA AND DO YOUR GAY VOODOO LIMBO TANGO AND WANGO DANCE AND JUMP AROUND AND PRANCE AND RUN ALL OVER THE PLACE HALF NAKED THERE.

Mr. Adams’ article has the charming title, “How_to_bomb_a_gay_bath_house” and I highly recommend it. Read it and experience the “hate” for yourself. And yes, he does recommend that Ann Coulter follow six steps for bombing a gay bath house -- but it’s not what you think! It’s all good, clean fun.

Hatred is explicitly Adams’ subject:

Perhaps the most compelling reason for Ann to refrain from issuing an apology is that it might send the message that homosexuality is somehow “wrong.” Those saying that the implication that Edwards is a homosexual is “defamatory” are suggesting that homosexuality is “bad.” This flies in the face of the teachings of the official religion of the Diversity Movement, which is, of course, moral relativism.

Every time I get into a discussion about homosexuality I am accused of being “secretly gay.” When the accuser is strait (sic), he shows how much he secretly hates homosexuals. When the accuser is gay, he shows how much he secretly hates himself. Ann should not mimic this hatred by apologizing for something Leftists do regularly and unapologetically.

Q.E.D. And yet in the middle of this farrago of taunts, incitements to violence, and monster wit, Adams actually does, in a way, answer Larry Kramer’s question. He recounts an occasion when, during a casual visit with a man who “happened to be gay,” the gay guy joked that he had furnished his place in “Early 20th Century Colonial Faggot.” He made the joke partially because he had a few too many drinks before his guests arrived. But he also did it because many homosexuals have never really aspired to the goal of making everyone feel as comfortable as they feel they have a right to feel at all times.

Interestingly enough, this sounds a note very similar to one hit by Garrison Keillor in a recent piece entitled, “Stating the obvious,” in which the homespun humorist bemoans what he calls serial monogamy (and what my old Lutheran pastor more sternly called serial polygamy), and in which he advises “stereotypical gay men” to can the flamboyance if they want to be “accepted as couples and daddies.”

I agree with his idea that children should take center stage in the family drama, but he would have come across as a whole lot less snide and sanctimonious if the thrice-married Keillor had mentioned his own serial polygamy.

And his timing is atrocious. We are in the middle of a veritable heat wave of anti-gay hate -- when the state of Virginia, as an example, has passed a draconian anti-equality amendment that forbids any marriage-mimicking legal contracts between gay couples, including simple power of attorney arrangements. In other words, the people of Virginia voted to curtail the freedom of some -- but only some -- taxpaying citizens to legally designate the person who is closest to them emotionally to act on their behalf if they’re incapacitated.

This is an amendment with a purpose: to drive openly gay people from the state.

I don’t believe that Garrison Keillor is anti-gay, but he definitely represents the problem Larry Kramer is talking about. While the fundamentalists are totally fixated on wiping same sex love off the face of the earth, our friends are often lukewarm. Candidates are cowardly because they know very well that discomfort with the social change that gay equality represents cuts across the ideological spectrum. That’s why it’s so valuable to the right. It magnifies the ability of an embattled minority to dominate the rest of us.

Fighting with each other while these madmen take over the world only benefits Halliburton. It’s time for people of good will to unite and ACT-UP against the real source of social instability, which is and always has been hate.

Patricia Goldsmith is a member of Long Island Media Watch, a grassroots free media and democracy watchdog group.

_______________________________

Peace Y'all

Tags: Gay Rights

Propaganda and Conscience

Today we have a post from Peace Tree contributing author, Patricia Goldsmith.

Propaganda and Conscience
Patricia Goldsmith

Watching Shut Up and Sing took me right back to the national dementia of 2003, when the Bush administration worked the country up into a war frenzy with lies, innuendos, and delusional images of mushroom clouds ascending from the ruins of American cities. BushCo was so confident, the propaganda was so overwhelming, that even people who knew better had occasional spasms of doubt.

The corporate media were nothing less than reverent as Colin Powell, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld did whatever it took to sell the war. And it worked.

New York City restaurants poured expensive French wines into the sewer, while the congressional cafeteria started serving “freedom fries.” UN weapons inspector Hans Blix was a spineless fool who didn’t know what he was talking about. Scott Ritter was accused of being a spy. The UN was a bunch of timid old ladies whose time had passed. Diplomacy itself was reviled as nothing but a euphemism for appeasement.

Even when the war propaganda failed to convince, it intimidated. In my own little village on Long Island, I saw a bumper sticker that said “War Protesters Makes Great Speed Bumps,” and a diner with a sign in the window that said “No War Protesters Welcome.”

Enter the Dixie Chicks. The great pleasure of the movie was seeing these three young women grit their teeth and get through a radio blackout, CD bonfires, the over-the-top invective of the rightwing attack machine, an anti-Chicks song by Toby Keith, and even death threats. Four years down the road, their honesty and courage come across, while the pro-war fanatics look . . . foolish. And not in a good way.

It brings to mind Hannah Arendt’s comments on the banality of evil. Viewing the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, Arendt saw not a monster but a horrifying clown. A conformist, a true believer. Someone who would feel guilty for being late to work, but not guilty for the work he did—supervising the transport of countless Jews to the death camps.

In Arendt’s view, Eichmann—and the millions of other Germans who acted as human cogs in the Nazi war machine—were triumphs of propaganda. Propaganda’s purpose is to replace rational thought with slogans and clichés. It works steadily to grind down the individual conscience and replace it with loyalty to a group—which Eichmann called duty. Only failing to do his duty could make him to feel guilty.

In that he sounds suspiciously like Joel Surnow, co-creator and executive producer of the hit show 24 —and, as it happens, a good friend of Rush Limbaugh.

According to a recent article by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker, a delegation of experts from West Point, the US Army, and the FBI went to Hollywood recently to complain that the way torture is portrayed on 24 is undermining their ability to train troops and agents in professional interrogation techniques. Trainees simply refuse to believe that torture doesn’t work.

Not only does torture not generate actionable intelligence, but according to FBI interrogation expert Joe Navarro, torture is especially ineffective in the case of the ticking time bomb—the favorite scenario of torture apologists and the main plot device on 24 —because the person being tortured knows he only has to hang on for a limited amount of time.

They also made it clear to writers and producers that in real life no one can torture and remain rational and reliable the way Jack Bauer does. Says Navarro, “Only a psychopath can torture and be unaffected. You don’t want people like that in your organization. They are untrustworthy, and tend to have grotesque other problems.”

Both points are pretty obvious, once you think about it—which shows how seldom we do. A brilliantly crafted, suspenseful program like 24 is damaging precisely because it preempts rational thought, making reason seem somehow unworthy of the values at stake.

That’s certainly the position taken by Surnow, who says, Eichmann-esque, “If someone had one of my children, or my wife, I would hope I’d do it. There is nothing—nothing—I wouldn’t do.” Nothing, apparently, except listen to the warnings of people who actually know what they’re talking about.

Kiefer Sutherland, who plays Jack Bauer, does not defend the show’s representation of torture. Instead, he hopes that people are able to distinguish fantasy from reality. Talk about wishful thinking. Clearly, people are not able to make that distinction, particularly in an environment where there is no consensus on what constitutes a fact.

We Americans like to think we’re somehow morally superior, not just to other nations but to something like propaganda, which, to a lot of people, sounds like some kind of lame excuse. We have such complete faith in our grounding in right and wrong that we think we’re immune to evil. We put our faith in fundamentalist religious leaders who tell us that good and evil are unchanging, eternal verities—unlike mere facts.

But looking back, it’s clear that what divided the country so deeply before and during the early stages of our unprovoked attack on Iraq was a simple question of fact: were George W. Bush and his minions telling the truth or not?

A connection between al Qaeda and Iraq; WMDs; yellow cake from Niger; bringing freedom and democracy to the country and the whole region: it was all a pack of lies.

And if we have such a totally immovable sense of right and wrong, one wonders why we’ve so blandly swallowed the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. If torture isn’t absolutely evil, at all times and in all places, then what is?

Or do we play with words to fool our consciences, and, like Alberto Gonzales, simply define torture out of existence? Gonzales’ updated definition, replacing that of US law and the Geneva Conventions, is that torture is inflicting pain equivalent to major organ failure or death. Sounds more like attempted murder to me.

The fact is most people in most places tend to go along with conventional wisdom and comply with authority. It’s not generally a bad thing. It predisposes us to be law-abiding and makes peace possible. But when the same powerful interests control both government and the media, then we are all vulnerable to propaganda, and under the influence of propaganda, ordinary people are capable of doing very great evil without even feeling guilty.

_________________________

Peace y'all

Tags: Neo Con Propaganda Patricia Goldsmith