Trickle Down of Hatred
OPINION
An Insidious State of Mind: Trickle Down of Hatred
By: Chip Arndt
President of The Freedom Democrats/Miami-Dade GLBT Dem. Caucus
Partner at MerchantAdvantage.com
Winner of The Amazing Race 4
LINDA VESTER, FOX News Channel: "You say you’d rather not talk to liberals at all?"
ANN COULTER: "I think a baseball bat is the most effective way these days." - 10/6/2004
*NSYNC's Lance Bass revealed he's gay and dating my former partner, igniting a worldwide media frenzy. Only Mel Gibson's alcohol-saturated, anti-Semitic tirade interrupted the orgy of stories about the boy band star who kisses boys. The day after Lance's People issue appeared, three thugs attacked six gay men in San Diego with a baseball bat and knife about the same time thugs in New Mexico began to use a gay 18-year old they had courageously tied up as a human punching bag, beating him until dawn. Though part of a newsworthy nationwide increase in LGBT assaults, mainstream media ignored their stories, and not simply because no celebrities were involved.
The two greatest factors in the initial indifference to AIDS were the Reagan administration and mainstream media. It wasn’t just Reagan’s long silence. The month I turned 16 (just recognizing my attraction to men), Reagan’s spokesman made a joke of a reporter’s question about AIDS, mocking him for even asking. "Trickle down economics" might have been fantasy but their attitude about "the gay plague" was very real and trickled down to local governments and straight media. Now we have a President who has embraced the antigay agenda, using his office as a bully pulpit, emphasis on both words, to demonize gay Americans—red meat for red states. And, while Bill Clinton created job protections for gay federal employees, the Bush administration has tried to gut them. This has trickled down to reenergize those who already hated us to retarget our civil liberties. As in the 80s, it has trickled down to some media, too. And, in the words of NGLTF Executive Director Matt Foreman, it “poisons culture and inspires some to believe that it is open season on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.”
Respected media stopped providing platforms years ago to anyone who used the Bible to justify denying people of color or Jews full civil rights. Yet, for almost as long, antigay-for-pay pros like the Ayatollah Jerry Falwell have been exploiting us with impunity. Falwell remains their superstar despite a history of outrageous claims such as insisting gays with AIDS were purposely trying to infect others by donating blood, or that gays and lesbians were responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He's paid lip service to job protection but his hefty haunches are bent busily milking his latest cash cow; warning his flock that “There is no end to the slippery slope of same-sex marriage.” Falwell and his bleating brethren continue to be as welcome at the doors of TV news divisions as the Publishers Clearing House Prize Patrol would be at yours.
Still, their hate speech remains within the PG lexicon of the Bible, and while epithets for Blacks and Jews were banished decades ago from national airwaves, it's very different at the Church of Cable News. MSNBC, for instance, employs their very own sultan of slur, Don Imus, and frequently features freelance hit woman Ann Coulter. Before television, people with their lack of shame and addiction to attention made a living biting the heads off of chickens at carnival side shows. Today, they grow rich digging their teeth into those politically weaker than them.
With his perpetual smirk, Imus described out Wimbledon champ Amelie Mauresmo as “a big old lesbo,” and drooled about “Fudgepack Mountain” while MSNBC star Chris Matthews chirped about “Bareback Mounting.” Which brings us back to Fraulein Coulter, cable television’s Cobra Woman; all venom all the time. To her, arrest of a Bush advisor was “revenge of the queers,” and it's “about even money” Hillary Clinton's a lesbian. She told Matthews that Bill Clinton is probably a latent homosexual because his “wild promiscuity shows a fear-hostility of women,” simultaneously sliming gay men and a former President. Then, fangs totally bared:
MATTHEWS: “How do you know that Bill Clinton's gay?”
COULTER: “He may not be gay, but Al Gore, total fag. No, I'm just kidding. ...”
Matthews and MSNBC can protest their own innocence while disgracing the First Amendment until they are red, white, and blue in the face, and Coulter can call it a joke, but this imagined slightly different exchange, relative to past discussion about Clinton's personality, would never have aired:
MATTHEWS: “Do you think Bill Clinton could actually be black?”
COULTER: “He may not be black, but Al Gore, total nigger. No, I'm just kidding. ...”
Would Matthews have called her “brilliant” and thanked her for coming as he did after she called Gore a fag? Would he have still said he'd “love to have her back”? Or would he have said, “That language is unacceptable. Get the hell off my set and never come back.”?
Would Mel Gibson's career be hanging by a thread if he had asked the cop, “Are you a fag?” Until we insist that “fag” equals “nigger” (Madame Coulter’s word) equals “kike,” we will not only not be fully free, we will not be safe. “Animals” like those San Diego’s mayor referred to will still be crushing our skulls; there will be more Matthew Shepards, Billy Jack Gaithers, Gwen Araujos, Stephanie Thomases, Ukea Davises, ad infinitum.
Their killers don’t have to be regular Imus listeners or Coulterites. The slurs and lies of all of those who vilify us eventually merge into one great toxic cloud; each evil individual voice enlarging the chorus cheering our victimization. Matthews, et al., may deny their own blood-stained hands, but we stay silent before them at our peril. Are the strategies we're using as successful as some we've used in the past; as successful as the tactics of those waging “holy war” against us?
From the White House down to the house of worship next door, homophobia has mutated into homo-hysteria. The trickle down erodes how others see us and legal protections we wrongly thought were inviolate. Allowed to rise to a river, its sound will drown out the voice of Liberty itself; returning us to a time when our lives were but toys tossed between the hands of the powerful.
“Our job is not to get those people who dislike us to love us. Nor was our aim in the civil rights movement to get prejudiced white people to love us. Our aim was to try to create the kind of America, legislatively, morally, and psychologically, such that even though some whites continued to hate us, they could not openly manifest that hate. That's our job today: to control the extent to which people can publicly manifest antigay sentiment." – Bayard Rustin
An Insidious State of Mind: Trickle Down of Hatred
By: Chip Arndt
President of The Freedom Democrats/Miami-Dade GLBT Dem. Caucus
Partner at MerchantAdvantage.com
Winner of The Amazing Race 4
LINDA VESTER, FOX News Channel: "You say you’d rather not talk to liberals at all?"
ANN COULTER: "I think a baseball bat is the most effective way these days." - 10/6/2004
*NSYNC's Lance Bass revealed he's gay and dating my former partner, igniting a worldwide media frenzy. Only Mel Gibson's alcohol-saturated, anti-Semitic tirade interrupted the orgy of stories about the boy band star who kisses boys. The day after Lance's People issue appeared, three thugs attacked six gay men in San Diego with a baseball bat and knife about the same time thugs in New Mexico began to use a gay 18-year old they had courageously tied up as a human punching bag, beating him until dawn. Though part of a newsworthy nationwide increase in LGBT assaults, mainstream media ignored their stories, and not simply because no celebrities were involved.
The two greatest factors in the initial indifference to AIDS were the Reagan administration and mainstream media. It wasn’t just Reagan’s long silence. The month I turned 16 (just recognizing my attraction to men), Reagan’s spokesman made a joke of a reporter’s question about AIDS, mocking him for even asking. "Trickle down economics" might have been fantasy but their attitude about "the gay plague" was very real and trickled down to local governments and straight media. Now we have a President who has embraced the antigay agenda, using his office as a bully pulpit, emphasis on both words, to demonize gay Americans—red meat for red states. And, while Bill Clinton created job protections for gay federal employees, the Bush administration has tried to gut them. This has trickled down to reenergize those who already hated us to retarget our civil liberties. As in the 80s, it has trickled down to some media, too. And, in the words of NGLTF Executive Director Matt Foreman, it “poisons culture and inspires some to believe that it is open season on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.”
Respected media stopped providing platforms years ago to anyone who used the Bible to justify denying people of color or Jews full civil rights. Yet, for almost as long, antigay-for-pay pros like the Ayatollah Jerry Falwell have been exploiting us with impunity. Falwell remains their superstar despite a history of outrageous claims such as insisting gays with AIDS were purposely trying to infect others by donating blood, or that gays and lesbians were responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He's paid lip service to job protection but his hefty haunches are bent busily milking his latest cash cow; warning his flock that “There is no end to the slippery slope of same-sex marriage.” Falwell and his bleating brethren continue to be as welcome at the doors of TV news divisions as the Publishers Clearing House Prize Patrol would be at yours.
Still, their hate speech remains within the PG lexicon of the Bible, and while epithets for Blacks and Jews were banished decades ago from national airwaves, it's very different at the Church of Cable News. MSNBC, for instance, employs their very own sultan of slur, Don Imus, and frequently features freelance hit woman Ann Coulter. Before television, people with their lack of shame and addiction to attention made a living biting the heads off of chickens at carnival side shows. Today, they grow rich digging their teeth into those politically weaker than them.
With his perpetual smirk, Imus described out Wimbledon champ Amelie Mauresmo as “a big old lesbo,” and drooled about “Fudgepack Mountain” while MSNBC star Chris Matthews chirped about “Bareback Mounting.” Which brings us back to Fraulein Coulter, cable television’s Cobra Woman; all venom all the time. To her, arrest of a Bush advisor was “revenge of the queers,” and it's “about even money” Hillary Clinton's a lesbian. She told Matthews that Bill Clinton is probably a latent homosexual because his “wild promiscuity shows a fear-hostility of women,” simultaneously sliming gay men and a former President. Then, fangs totally bared:
MATTHEWS: “How do you know that Bill Clinton's gay?”
COULTER: “He may not be gay, but Al Gore, total fag. No, I'm just kidding. ...”
Matthews and MSNBC can protest their own innocence while disgracing the First Amendment until they are red, white, and blue in the face, and Coulter can call it a joke, but this imagined slightly different exchange, relative to past discussion about Clinton's personality, would never have aired:
MATTHEWS: “Do you think Bill Clinton could actually be black?”
COULTER: “He may not be black, but Al Gore, total nigger. No, I'm just kidding. ...”
Would Matthews have called her “brilliant” and thanked her for coming as he did after she called Gore a fag? Would he have still said he'd “love to have her back”? Or would he have said, “That language is unacceptable. Get the hell off my set and never come back.”?
Would Mel Gibson's career be hanging by a thread if he had asked the cop, “Are you a fag?” Until we insist that “fag” equals “nigger” (Madame Coulter’s word) equals “kike,” we will not only not be fully free, we will not be safe. “Animals” like those San Diego’s mayor referred to will still be crushing our skulls; there will be more Matthew Shepards, Billy Jack Gaithers, Gwen Araujos, Stephanie Thomases, Ukea Davises, ad infinitum.
Their killers don’t have to be regular Imus listeners or Coulterites. The slurs and lies of all of those who vilify us eventually merge into one great toxic cloud; each evil individual voice enlarging the chorus cheering our victimization. Matthews, et al., may deny their own blood-stained hands, but we stay silent before them at our peril. Are the strategies we're using as successful as some we've used in the past; as successful as the tactics of those waging “holy war” against us?
From the White House down to the house of worship next door, homophobia has mutated into homo-hysteria. The trickle down erodes how others see us and legal protections we wrongly thought were inviolate. Allowed to rise to a river, its sound will drown out the voice of Liberty itself; returning us to a time when our lives were but toys tossed between the hands of the powerful.
“Our job is not to get those people who dislike us to love us. Nor was our aim in the civil rights movement to get prejudiced white people to love us. Our aim was to try to create the kind of America, legislatively, morally, and psychologically, such that even though some whites continued to hate us, they could not openly manifest that hate. That's our job today: to control the extent to which people can publicly manifest antigay sentiment." – Bayard Rustin
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