i got a complaint from a heterosexually married straight white man
- November 13th, 2016
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Here’s something from one of the arguments I mentioned in my previous post. This is from a discussion with a heterosexually-married straight white Catholic couple – both Republicans – who argue that talking about the Trump supporters hating people is unfair, and stereotyping, and hate speech directed at straight white men.
He and his wife are both very Catholic – and very conservatively Catholic – which will explain some of the below, which otherwise might appear irrelevant.
The Republican party does hate LGBT people. Democrats used to, though less – that changed slowly over the 1980s and 90s.
Right now, the Republican VP elect and the man most in charge of domestic policy in Mr. Trump’s transition team both also hate LGBT people, and are part of a movement that hate LGBT people, and one is an executive director of an organisation that officially hates LGBT people.
Mike Pence opposes Anna and my marriage. Mike Pence backed a constitutional amendment banning it. Mike Pence thinks I should be banned from certain jobs, such as the military. Mike Pence supports civil rights law, except for queers, where he opposes it. Mike Pence supports hate crimes law, except for queers, where he opposes it. (This is not a commentary on the validity of support for those laws, but it is a commentary on the exceptions he makes.)
Mike Pence thinks me and Anna being married will destroy society.
Mike Pence supports “conversion therapy,” and advocates Federal funding for it. I’ve talked to people who have been through “conversion therapy,” involuntarily, sent there by their parents. It is a fraud, a quackery, and ranges between ludicrous bullshit and literally torture – look up electroshock aversion therapy sometime, if you want a sample.
I know people subjected to this. It is real.
Mr. Pence thinks it’s okay to torture people like me into not being queer, and thinks the Federal government should fund it.
I don’t know Mr. Pence’s position on Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which overturned state laws making me illegal for existing, but the movement he’s proudly a part of supported those laws, fiercely, with newtype blood libel, massive lobbying efforts, and public initiatives to make me various degrees of illegal. I worked eight of those, including ground work, going door-to-door arguing why people shouldn’t vote to do things like ban me from many kinds of employment and have public schools teach that I was, oh, what was the phrase, it showed up in three initiatives – “illegal, immoral, perverse, and wrong,” I think it was. I don’t know that Mr. Pence supported that – but the fundamentalist evangelical political movement he is a part of absolutely did.
And that’s the vice-president-elect you voted for.
And Mr. Blackwell, who the Wall Street Journal and other media have reported is in charge of the domestic policy group inside Mr. Trump’s transition team is worse. I do know that the Family Research Council supported all these initiatives, because I was there, fighting them. As well as fighting their state-level mirror and proxy groups.
Mr. Trump chose both of these people to make domestic policy, and said all the way back in January that he would be onboard with overturning Obergefell v. Hodges, which triggered Federal recognition of my marriage.
That’s the president-elect you voted for.
If this was Northern Ireland, and I supported, argued, and voted for a rabidly anti-Catholic party, one that argued that the government should fund torturing Catholics into converting to Protestantism, would you argue that I didn’t hate Catholics?
If this was Northern Ireland, and I supported, argued, and voted for a rabidly anti-Catholic party, one that argued that the government should fund torturing Catholics into converting to Protestantism, but I said it wasn’t for that, it was for other policies they supported, and said I didn’t actually have anything against Catholics but was voting for this party anyway, would you believe that? Even if you did, would that make it okay?
Would my callous disregard for your rights and safety be cool with you after they won and started setting up a transition team stacked with believers in the anti-Catholic parts of the platform? After allied parties started outlining the steps of their plans to implement the first parts of this?
If you complained about all of these actions, and talked about your fear now that plans are being moved into place, and I said, “Why are you being so horrible to me, talking about all this? Why are you so awful, calling me such a hater? You’re stereotyping me! And hating me!” – how would you react to that?
Be honest. And show your work.
And that’s only the one axis. I’m not even going to talk in depth about the racism and demagoguery, though really, I should, because Mr. Trump’s alt-right base is overtly and proudly racist, proudly misogynistic, proudly anti-Semitic.
And it’s not just one-way support from that alt-right, either. Mr. Trump and his team retweeted their memes. Mr. Trump and his team appointed a self-declared alt-righter to run his campaign, one who made Breitbart into another home for them on the web. That alt-righter – Mr. Bannon – is now on the executive committee of the transition team. Mr. Trump brought them into the tent.
His campaign has made white supremacy campaignable again. I’m not including you on that, but when I see those targeted groups’ fears? I get it. They’re not making this shit up either.
It’s not that you’re a straight white guy. It’s that you’re a straight white guy who voted for this, and now are mad that we’re upset at the result. (Because it deeply and personally attacks core components of our lives. We have cause.) And here you are, trying to make it about all about your hurt feelings, and complaining about you feeling hated for your vote, when we’re trying to figure out whether those of us who can do it need to flee the country for our own safety.
I like you both. I didn’t know you that long when you were here, but I like you. But when the stakes are this high, well, you vote for part of it, you’re voting for all of it.
And you did.
Additional commentary on what they called my “ideological superweapon” is further down the blog page.
3 comments on Tumblr.
Further commentary, made in response to the woman in the conversation saying it’s unreasonable to say that hate is the “sole” motivator of “my opponent,” even though I didn’t say that; also, she fears I’m building some kind of – and I quote – “ideological superweapon.”
You don’t torture people because you love them.
You don’t urge parents to make their queer children homeless and destitute, and work to deny them any recourse, because you love those children.
(One of the worst things I’ve had to experience – and I have a lot of horrible experiences – was transcribing Beverly LaHaye consoling a sobbing mother who had followed Dr. LaHaye’s advice on this matter, and hear Dr. LaHaye tell her what a good and righteous person she was being, and how necessary it was to destroy her child.)
You don’t end people’s marriages because you love them. You don’t take their children away.
You don’t make blood libel against people because you love them.
(e.g., “Homosexuals are paedophiles who want to rape your children and give them AIDS because they have no other way to reproduce.” I heard that one a lot. “56% of gay men regularly eat the faeces of their sexual partners.” That’s one of my choice tidbits out of the lexicon of notorious fraudster Dr. Paul Cameron, also author of “The Death Penalty for Homosexuality.” How about “lesbians are nine times more likely to commit violent crimes such as murder than heterosexual women.” That’s just some of their propaganda off the top of my head. Oh wait, no – I forgot Scott Lively’s The Pink Swastika, which asserted that it wasn’t good Germans running the concentration camps, no – it was faggots.)
You don’t make people illegal because you love them.
What else could you call it, other, perhaps, than madness? You can excuse any of this any way you want to, but when push comes to shove, in real life, you don’t do this if you don’t have some hate on. You can pretend otherwise, but you’re pretending.
You might then decide that hate is justified. You might even decide it serves a greater good. You can, like them, decide God Said So and therefore it is holy hate. But it’s still hate – some of them will even say it, couched as righteous hate. Godly hate. That’s less common, but it’s out there too.
But when you’re advocating my extinction and saying you’re doing it out of love for me, I’m calling horseshit on that. Really, in the end, I don’t care what’s in their heart of hearts; I don’t care why they want to destroy me; I merely provide the evidence, in the form of their own words, platforms, policies, and law, that they do.
And there are no circumstances where I would not fight this. The right to peaceable existence is not debatable, and I do not need to justify it. Demanding civil debate about it is madness, because the question itself is intrinsically uncivil. It is fundamentally inarguable, it is about removing form civility, about abandoning civics for force.
Even if that use of force is in the disguise of law.
So, there it is. Go ahead. Talk about my ideological superweapon of hate. I’ll just be over here, trying to stay alive.