}

Saturday, September 24, 2011

As for example

The radical right anti-gay industry has taken a subtle but noticeable unified turn in their propaganda: They exclusively portray themselves as victims. I’ll return to this topic in another post, but the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” provides a quick snapshot, since they all commented in a short period of time.

So, here are some typical examples of the rightwing’s anti-gay propaganda:

From head of the SPLC-certified anti-gay hate group, the “Family” Research Council, Tony Perkins, via email:
"’F’RC will continue to monitor the consequences of this reversal of 236 years of American military policy, limit the damage and demand that the Defense Department do the same. Expect to see celebrations from homosexual groups and fawning stories in the media about how 'the sky has not fallen.' That's only because there will be no press releases from the new victims of sexual harassment or assault, the soldiers exposed to HIV tainted blood, the thousands of servicemembers who choose not to reenlist rather than forfeit their freedom of speech and religion, and the untold number of citizens who choose never to join the military. It's clear this President is more interested in appeasing sexual revolutionaries than in fighting America's enemies."
That hate group’s Peter Sprigg, who says homosexuality should be made illegal, added this:
“We will have reverse discrimination… it will be those who hold traditional values and who disapprove of homosexual conduct who will be in the closet and forced to remain silent”
And Bob Maginnis, the hate group’s “senior fellow”, takes things even further by demanding the exclusion of gay people, rather than a mere reinstatement of DADT:
"They did not tell the Pentagon that homosexuals have to serve; they just said we're removing this law. So a new president could impose a new regulation or for that matter, Congress could pass a law saying 'we now prohibit the service by people that are known to be homosexual.' That's easily done. Even though it would be the right thing to do, it would take a very courageous future leader to do anything about it." [emphasis in original]
Picking up on the “change the government” theme, Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's “Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission”, uses his religion for partisan political gain in addition to attacking gay people:
"I think there's a grave concern on the part of the Southern Baptist chaplains that I've talked to in all branches of the service that their First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and freedom of religious free exercise are going to be either extinguished or severely limited in the near future—and they're very, very, very concerned."

"I believe that if we get a Republican president, we're going to hear the senior officers in all of the branches singing a very different tune than the one they're singing now. I know they're under a tremendous amount of pressure to go along with this political experimentation with our military, which is totally uncalled for. It's just a disgrace that this is going on."

Source: http://tinyurl.com/43afr7p
And finally, an absurdly over-the-top attack on gay people by a Roman Catholic priest, Alexander Webster, in a guest column for Stars & Stripes:
"On Sept. 20, 2011, a date that will live in infamy, the U.S. armed forces were deliberately and successfully attacked by advocates of the scourge of homosexuality. The elimination of the last vestige of moral restraint on sexual perversion in the U.S. military, commonly known as the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, ushers in a new Orwellian era in which the military leadership of our nation will proclaim the unnatural as natural, the unhealthy as healthy and the immoral as moral. As an Orthodox priest who still loves all of the troops I served as a chaplain for a quarter of a century, I pray that God the Holy Trinity will preserve and protect the U.S. armed forces—especially in this new Dark Age."
These people are united in their determination to victimise GLBT people, which makes their attempt to portray themselves as “victims” all the more pathetic.

1 comment:

Roger Owen Green said...

They always paint themselves as victims.
Did you see the ABC News story from earlier in the week about the harrassment of servicepeople, unreported because of DADT? Outrageous.