'Rights Just for Us': The Gay Left's Self-Serving Agenda
LA Times, Op. Ed.
27.03.2003
In case you haven't kept up with the gay left's political agenda, here it is in a nutshell: We demand that gay Americans be granted the same constitutional rights that other Americans enjoy. However, we reserve the right to deny those rights to anyone we dislike.
In Orwellian parlance, this is known as the "all animals are equal but some are more equal than others" strategy.
Right now, a particularly striking example of this tactic is playing itself out in the media and the U.S. Supreme Court. On Wednesday, the high court heard arguments in the case of Lawrence vs. Texas, a challenge to Texas' Homosexual Conduct Law, which criminalizes oral and anal sex between consenting adults.
The Texas law is being challenged by John G. Lawrence and Tyron Garner, who were prosecuted after police investigating a false report of a man with a gun at an apartment complex broke into Lawrence's apartment and found him having sex with Garner.
The Supreme Court is suspected to have taken this case as a means of overturning a widely decried 1986 precedent, Bowers vs. Hardwick, in which the court upheld the conviction of two gay men under a Georgia state sodomy law.
But just as gay rights groups have been pushing hardest for equal protection under the law, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation has been conducting a campaign to deprive someone else -- Michael Savage, the radio shock jock and MSNBC talk show host -- of that same protection. Savage committed the grave sin of exercising his right to speak his twisted and mediocre mind, referring to gay men and lesbians as "perverts" and describing them as a "mafia" that "wants our children."
In a concerted effort to silence him, GLAAD has launched a "public education campaign," the same Robespierrian enterprise it used to torpedo Dr. Laura Schlessinger's short-lived television show in 2000.
With a barrage of outraged phone calls and e-mails, the group has methodically intimidated the show's sponsoring advertisers into pulling their spots. Giants like Proctor & Gamble, Kraft, General Mills and Dell already have turned tail, according to GLAAD.
"These companies get it," said Joan M. Garry, GLAAD's executive director.
Yes, they get it, and clearly Garry doesn't.
They get that, as White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said of former "Politically Incorrect" host Bill Maher's impolitic remarks regarding the Sept. 11 attacks, "people need to watch what they say." They get that rights are only for the self-righteously opportunistic. And they most certainly get that when it comes to squelching speech, GLAAD and the most draconian snoops of the Bush administration are playing for the same team.
GLAAD's Web site is a classic display of the gay left's endemic schizophrenia and myopic selfishness. At the top of the page, the group urges constituents to agitate against the Bowers case ruling and on behalf of gay rights to privacy. Immediately below, it applauds its own devious attempt to deny Savage his right to free speech.
GLAAD partisans recognize no conflict between these positions. They just don't get it.
Meanwhile, Savage has responded to his muzzlers in kind, threatening to "go after their funding."
I hope he succeeds. Perhaps then in their decrepitude, Garry and her fatuous posse will learn once and for all that censorship cuts both ways; that the social contract is reciprocal, a fragile give-and-take proposition; and that GLAAD, like Savage, subsists on the good graces of its opponents and their commitment to liberty -- key word -- for all.
http://janetrenoishot.tripod.com/Norahvincent/la3.27.3.htm
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