Category: LGBT issues

ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio attacks gay marriage—and marriage in general

November 19, 2022 • 11:24 am

Andrew Sullivan’s latest column on gay marriage led me to a hateful Instagram post by Chase Strangio, Deputy Director for Transgender Justice and staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). We first met Strangio, a transgender man, when he called for a ban on Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage, a book that I (and Harriet Hall) found quite engrossing (and disturbing). After Hall’s positive review was published on the Science Based Medicine site, two editors, Steve Novella and David Gorski, retracted it (see here), and it was published at the link above. (You can see more of my posts on Strangio’s shenanigan’s here.)

Regardless of what you think of Shrier’s book, no ACLU lawyer should be calling for book banning!

But I digress.  Read Sullivan’s column by clicking on the screenshot (and subscribe if you read it often):

I was surprised by one thing about Sullivan’s column, which was prompted by last week’s Congressional push to repeal the 1986 Defense of Marriage Act, a law that defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman. But it also allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages that were legal in other states. As Wikipedia notes, “All of the act’s provisions, except those relating to its short title, were ruled unconstitutional or legally devoid by Supreme Court decisions in the cases of United States v. Windsor (2013) and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which invalidated the law and any enforcement it had.”

The latest Congressional action, then, in promoting a new bill (the “Respect for Marriage” bill), was largely symbolic, but it will pass since many Republicans in Congress supported it in a test vote. It was also a way to prevent the Supreme Court from somehow resurrecting the Defense of Marriage act, as Clarence Thomas muttered threats about gay marriage during the hearing on the Dobbs case.

At any rate, Sullivan describes opposition to gay marriage (and to the Respect for Marriage bill) by the right, which is expected, but also by many LGBTQIA+ people on the Left. This opposition, which isn’t new, is what surprised me, but it’s been a recurring theme. As Sullivan notes,

One more thing: some now argue that marriage equality was the gateway drug, as it were, to attempts to undo the sex binary, and has inevitably led to today’s illiberal, intolerant LGBTQIA+ movement. But what this fails to grasp is that the arguments for marriage equality were opposed by these extremists in the first place (and still are by many). Marriage was not the first step in a slippery slope of left-extremism; it was a key and seismic move by centrist gays and lesbians in the precisely opposite direction!

Marriage equality was disdained by the “queer” left for decades. They saw what it was: a liberal attack on leftism, and a conservative attack on reactionism. That move to the moderate center appalled them. Even now, one of the chief leaders of the current LGBTQIA+ movement, Chase Strangio, is mad that the RFMA is meeting success:

I feel an inexplicable amount of rage witnessing the Senate likely overcome the filibuster to vote to codify marriage rights for same-sex couples … I find it disappointing how much time and resource went into fighting for inclusion in the deeply flawed and fundamentally violent institution of civil marriage. I believe in many ways, the mainstream LGBTQ legal movement caused significant harm in further entrenching the institution of marriage as an organizing structure of US civil society.

They never wanted to join a “heteronormative,” “patriarchal,” “fundamentally violent” institution. They despised the center and the mainstream and the religious. They wanted to destroy marriage, not include gays in it.

I couldn’t believe that Strangio would really issue a hateful statement like that, showing his “rage” against a bill that would support gay marriage, and describing marriage itself as a “deeply flawed and fundamentally violent institution.” Where is he coming from?

And, sure enough, here’s Strangio’s instagram post, verifying Sullivan’s report. Read what he says:

Strangio is a man full of hate, and an unbalanced man whose views and actions undercut the liberalism and historical stand of the ACLU.  He is doing the organization no good. I rarely call for someone to be fired, but, as a long-time friend of the ACLU, I think they should let him go.

I’ve put a screenshot of the Instagram post below should it be removed. Click “Read more” if you want to see/recover it:

Continue reading “ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio attacks gay marriage—and marriage in general” →

Andrew Sullivan on the Netflix walkout and the anti-gay movement

October 25, 2021 • 9:30 am

Update: Over at his website (this portions can be read for free), Matt Taibbi goes hard after the MSM’s distorted reading of both Chapelle’s bit and its own faulty reporting. Read Taibbi’s “Cancel culture takes a big ‘L‘”.

*****************

After Netflix broadcast Dave Chappelle’s latest comedy show, “The Closer,” he was accused not just of transphobia, but homophobia, and by gay-plus organizations like GLAAD (see here and here, for instance). Netflix employees walked out in a protest, and had a scuffle with Chapelle fans who also showed up. Here’s an example of the rancor (this video is hard to find; I think the Netflix protestors are embarrassed, as they shoul be):

Here’s Andrew Sullivan’s take on the incident from his latest column on Substack (I believe a read is free, but do subscribe):

It was, as it turned out, a bit of a non-event. The walkout by transgender Netflix employees and their supporters to demand that the company take down and apologize for the latest Chappelle special attracted “dozens,” despite media hype.

But the scenes were nonetheless revealing. A self-promoting jokester showed up with a placard with the words “We Like Jokes” and “We Like Dave” to represent an opposing view. He was swiftly accosted by a man who ripped the poster apart, leaving the dude with just a stick, prompting the assailant to shout “He’s got a weapon!” Pushed back by other protestors, he was then confronted by a woman right in front of him — shaking a tambourine — and yelling repeatedly into his face: “Repent, motherfucker! Repent! Repent!”

This is the state of what’s left of the gay rights movement in America. Judgmental, absolutist, intolerant, and hysterical, it looks to shut down speech it dislikes, drive its foes out of the public square, compile enemies’ lists of dangerous writers, artists, and politicians, and cancel and protest anything that does not comport with every tiny aspect of their increasingly deranged ideology.

Now gay activists don’t behave like this, at least now; it’s largely the trans activists who do, and Sullivan compares them to the opponents of gay rights in the past:

Anti-gay forces, hegemonic for centuries, were just like these trans activists. They were just as intent on suppressing and stigmatizing magazines, shows, and movies they believed were harmful. They too targeted individual artists and writers for personal destruction. They too believed that movies and comedy needed to be reined in order to prevent social harm. They protested in front of movie theaters. They tried to get shows canceled. And if you’d marched in any gay demo or Pride in the 1990s, you’d always be prepared to confront a grimacing Christianist yelling “Repent! Repent!” in your face.

In fact, it’s hard not to see the trans far left as a farcical replay of the Religious Right of the past. They are the Dana Carvey church ladies of our time, except instead of saying “Could it be Satan?!” when confronting some cultural or moral transgression, they turn to the camera, clutch their pearls, and say “Could it be whiteness?!”

This was never, ever the spirit of the gay rights movement in the past. In fact, it was America’s guarantee of free expression and free association that made the gay rights movement possible. It was the First Amendment, and the spirit of the First Amendment, that was easily the most important right for gays for decades. From the fledgling Society for Human Rights, formed in Chicago in 1924, and its pioneering magazine, Friendship and Freedom, to the struggles against censorship in the 1950s, with One Magazine, and erotic Physique pamphlets under siege, it was the First Amendment that, especially under Oliver Wendell Holmes, allowed gay people to find each other, to develop arguments for their own dignity and self-worth, and to sustain free associations when the entire society viewed them as perverts and undesirables and child molesters.

What Sullivan says about the First Amendment and gay rights is, so far as I know, true. Thus the irony in that those backing trans rights often call for suppression of speech. A notable and especially ironic twist is that the ACLU itself, formerly a hard-nosed defender of the First Amendment, has as its chief attorney for trans right an explicit censor:

Seriously, I don’t know anybody who has “transphobia” in the sense that they want to suppress or deny the rights of transgender people. But within the issue there is room for debate about how cis-trans relations should work—cases involving prison enrollment, sports participation, and so on. But even to broach these topics is taboo, as J. K. Rowling and others have found who have questioned the exact equation of transwomen with natal (biological) women. The instant you mention such issues, you’re branded a transphobe and the mob descends. It’s easier to hurl epithets than cobble together a coherent defense.

I don’t remember such rancor with the gay rights movement, but of course that was a long time ago. There were of course dire things gay-rights advocates did, like “outing” closeted people, but it seems to me the movement advanced largely by reasoned argument—things like Andrew Sullivan’s cogent arguments for gay marriage. (Read, for example, his 1989 New Republic article, “Here comes the groom.”

At any rate, behavior like that depicted above, or the constant demonizing of people who are really in favor of trans rights as “transphobes” because they’re not 100% with the party line, will not only not help their cause, but plays right into the hands of Republicans eager to elect Trump in 2024. Sullivan goes on about the various ways that gay writers, poets, and playwrights used the First Amendment, but you can read that for yourself. He ends this way, chastising “the capture of the gay movement” by authoritarians who avoid reasoned argument. I’ve bolded one sentence because it’s so characteristic of this kind of authoritarianism:

The capture of the gay rights movement by humor-free, fragile products of the social justice industrial complex is not just terrible PR for all of us. It’s awful politics. They are not even trying to persuade, debate, or make reasoned arguments — as we did relentlessly in the marriage movement. They do not engage and invite critics, as we did. They try to destroy them. Instead of arguments, they tweet out slogans in all caps — TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN — as if they’re citing a Biblical text. And the act of persuasion, the key to any liberal democracy, is, for them, an unjust imposition of “emotional labor.” So much easier to coerce.

It also pains me to see the gay rights movement deploy what is in effect mob bullying as a tactic. That’s what these Twitter campaigns are all about. The way these fanatics have tried to turn one of the most successful and imaginative writers of our time, J.K. Rowling, into a hate object has been achieved by the foulest of language, elevated by the megaphone of social media. Yes: the very people most subject to bullying in childhood are now acting like bullies as adults. In the words of the great gay poet, W.H. Auden:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn.

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

This is the temptation. We have to resist it. It is a betrayal of so many through history. And it could provoke a backlash that is as damaging as it is deserved.

Now of course not all trans advocates behave this way. But I’ve seen very few telling their compatriots that they’re going too far. Who in the movement has criticized the ACLU’s Chase Strangio for explicitly calling for censorship?

NYT op-ed writer blames increased Trump voting by people of color and gays on “the white patriarchy”

November 7, 2020 • 12:30 pm

There is nothing, it seems, that can’t be blamed on the white patriarchy. The ludicrous extreme of such claims can be seen in Wednesday’s op-ed by Charles Blow in the New York Times. (click on screenshot below). Apparently the movement of the “oppressed” towards Republicans, as well as the high votes of white women for Trump, are not the results of individual reasoned decisions, but of the machinations of The Patriarchy. The column is unbelievable.

Maybe sociologists know why the votes have gone this way, but I don’t. Regardless, Blow says something that nobody disputes: people of color voted for Trump by a higher margin this year than in 2016. That’s also true for gay people—big time. Given Trump’s views and actions, I’m surprised, but I lack both the the expertise or chops to explain the numbers that Blow quotes:

A larger percentage of every racial minority voted for Trump this year than in 2016. Among Blacks and Hispanics, this percentage grew among both men and women, although men were more likely to vote for Trump than women.

. . . The fascinating story and movement are in the Black vote. Black people vote overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates. Black women vote more reliably Democratic than Black men — only 3 or 4 percent of Black women voted for the Republican candidate in 2008, 2012 and 2016. However, Donald Trump doubled that number this year, winning 8 percent of Black women’s votes.

Black men on the other hand have been inching away from the Democrats in recent elections, and continued that drift in this election. In 2008, 5 percent of Black men voted for John McCain; in 2012, 11 percent voted for Mitt Romney; in 2016, 13 percent voted for Trump; and, this year 18 percent voted for Trump.

The gay shift is remarkable:

This one pushed me back on my heels: the percentage of L.G.B.T. people voting for Trump doubled from 2016, moving from 14 percent to 28 percent. In Georgia the number was 33 percent.

This for a president who has attacked trans people in every way imaginable. As the Human Rights Campaign president, Alphonso David, pointed out in June, “The Trump-Pence administration is the most virulently anti-LGBTQ administration in decades.”

White women, too, are faulted (see below) for voting for their oppressors:

In any case, white women vote for Trump at higher rates than all other women, despite the fact that Trump has spent his first term, indeed his whole life, denigrating women.

I have no issues with these statistics, and assume they’re correct. My beef is what Blow makes of them. First, he asserts that those who voted for Trump were either racists or racist-enablers:

Let me be specific and explicit here: White people — both men and women — were the only group in which a majority voted for Trump, according to exit polls. To be exact, nearly three out of every five white voters in America are Trump voters.

It is so unsettling to consider that many of our fellow countrymen and women are either racists or accommodate racists or acquiesce to racists.

Well, Blow is a black man, so perhaps the idea that voting for Trump means a vote for racism—the weasel-out Blow proffers is “acquiesce to racists”—comes more naturally to him. But surely there are many people who voted for Trump who don’t see themselves as racists, or even see themselves as anti-racists. Instead, they may have considered other issues more important in their vote: their economic well-being, their fear that they might lose their jobs to overseas companies or to immigrants, and so on.  It is like saying that anybody who voted for Biden is a “woke enabler.” Now remember, I think that anybody who voted for Trump was making a serious mistake, voting for an unhinged demagogue who was destroying America. But I’m not willing to tar them all with the monicker of racism.

But that’s not the worst thing in this editorial. That would be Blow’s analysis of why so many “oppressed” people voted for Trump in the first place. Here it is:

All of this to me points to the power of the white patriarchy and the coattail it has of those who depend on it or aspire to it. It reaches across gender and sexual orientation and even race. Trump’s brash, privileged chest trumping and alpha-male dismissiveness and in-your-face rudeness are aspirational to some men and appealing to some women. Some people who have historically been oppressed will stand with the oppressors, and will aspire to power by proximity.

Seriously? A Stockholm Syndrome explanation?

This is wrong on so many levels. First of all, it’s not really an explanation at all: it literally begs the question. He’s made up an explanation that lacks any evidence at all.

Second, it infantilizes people of color, arguing that they mistakenly sought a nonexistent “power by proximity”, and are not going with the program that comports with their ethnicity. They are, as blacks call other blacks who show “white” behavior, “Oreos.” In other words, it is white men who have made black and Hispanic men and women vote for Trump.

Note, too, that Blow uses the term “historically oppressed.”  But if you’re not oppressed now, as many blacks, Hispanics, and women aren’t, should you consider the past history of your in-group when voting? Those who voted for Trump because they thought (correctly or not) that his policies made them better off might disagree.

That especially goes for gays, who have done so well, and are so oppression-free, that many of the Woke consider white gays, at least, to have “privilege”, not numbered among the oppressed (see here, for instance).  White gays have considerable power, and there’s absolutely no reason they should vote for Trump just to be hauled up the ladder on the coattails of The White Patriarchy.

It’s richly ironic that gays, Hispanics, blacks, and women are told by Blow that their votes were not only wrong, but were conditioned by the White Patriarchy as a misguided grab for power. As I said, it goes to show that there is absolutely nothing one doesn’t like that cannot be blamed on the White Patriarchy. Perhaps Blow should do a little more research on the complex question that he simplifies into intellectual pabulum. But of course, the New York Times now sees everything through the lens of race and oppression.

More arrant hypocrisy: D.C. Dyke March bans Israeli flags, Jewish pride flags, and American flags, but allows Palestinian flags

June 10, 2019 • 8:45 am

This is about the most hypocritical gesture I’ve seen from the Left since the Chicago Dyke March refused to allow Jewish “gay pride” flags (a star of David on a rainbow-colored banner) in its celebratory march two years ago.  According to many sources, including the three below, the DC Dyke March, which took place in Washington on Friday, banned all “nationalist symbols”. That included Israeli flags, Jewish gay pride flags, and American flags. They apparently still allowed marchers to wear Jewish symbols like yarmulkes or Star-of-David necklaces. And of course Palestinian flags were permitted (and perhaps encouraged!).

Read on:

Forward:

Washington Times:

The Jerusalem Post has the fullest explanation:

From The Jerusalem Post:

What is the DC Dyke March?

The DC Dyke March is an alternative parade to the main LGBTQ parade taking place this weekend in Washington, D.C. Its politics have traditionally been to the left of more mainstream pride marches. It’s one of a movement of Dyke Marches that have taken place nationwide.

The Dyke March’s description on its fundraising page says it’s focused this year on combating gentrification and displacement.

“Our goal is to encourage activism within our community and center transwomxn, queer womxn, nonbinary, lesbian, and other dyke identities who are oft-marginalized by the mainstream LGBTQ movement,” the webpage says, using an alternative spelling for “woman.” “We believe Dyke is not a sexuality, but a political identity centered on solidarity in each other’s struggles and a belief that none of us are free until we all are.”

If it’s focused on gentrification, why is everyone talking about Israel and Jewish stars?

One of the march’s policies is to discourage “nationalist symbols.” According to organizers of the march, that includes Israeli flags and American flags, which are the only ones they have mentioned specifically.

But the organizers are taking that policy one step further, and asking marchers not to bring a longtime symbol of LGBTQ rights, rainbow flags, with Jewish stars superimposed on the center. March organizers say those flags are reminiscent of the Israeli flag, which they say could feel threatening to Palestinian marchers. “We choose to prioritize Palestinian lives and justice in Palestine over lazy symbols,” organizers write.

The flags of other countries besides America and Israel are permitted. AsJill Raney (a Dyke March organizer) argued, American flags (and of course Israeli flags) are prohibited because these countries commit “human rights abuses.” The Post adds this:

“Palestinian flags are allowed because we believe they represent the hope for freedom for the Palestinian people,” Raney said. “The symbols of liberation are the whole point of Dyke March. Symbols of governments that cause human rights abuses are not welcome.” She didn’t explain how the Palestinian flag is not nationalist.

And of course, the red herring of “safety” comes up. March organizer Rae Gaines said this (my emphasis):

“The issue [with the Jewish Pride flag] is where the Star of David is positioned in a way that looks like an Israeli flag, it creates an unsafe space,” she said. “It really is a shame that Israel took this symbol of Judaism and turned it into this nationalist symbol….I understand the Jewish pride flag is a symbol that a lot of Jews have come to embrace, but there are so many other Jewish symbols that we can use to express our Judaism, like a Star of David [on a necklace], like a yarmulke, a tallit.”

Unsafe space? Seriously? Are these people 13 years old or something? I would think that it would express a form of solidarity if Palestinian dykes and Jewish dykes could march together with the emblems of their land. Only an idiot would claim that a Star of David on a rainbow flag would create an “unsafe space”.

The Palestinian flag is more than “not nationalist”, though Palestine isn’t yet a nation. It is the very symbol of oppression—of women and gays. The blatant hypocrisy of this whole Dyke March ban, which smacks of anti-Semitism, is demonstrated by the fact that that Palestine is a huge abuser of human rights, especially of gay people, women, and non-Muslims. “Dykes” are gay women, and both of those characteristics are oppressed not by Israel, but by Palestine. Go to the Wikipedia page on “LGBT rights in the State of Palestine” to see the discrimination faced by LGBTQ people in Palestine, which notes:

Homosexuality is illegal in the Gaza Strip but not in the West Bank, although LGBT rights are not protected in either. [Note below that lesbianism isn’t explicitly banned.]

. . . According to a 2010 compendium of laws against homosexuality produced by the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual and Intersex Association (ILGA), the decriminalization of homosexuality in Palestine is patchwork. On the one hand, same-sex acts were decriminalized in the Jordanian-controlled West Bank in 1951 and remain so to this day. On the other hand, in the Gaza Strip, the British Mandate Criminal Code Ordinance, No. 74 of 1936 remains in force and continues to outlaw same-sex acts between men, although lesbian women are not subjects of the code and their relations are thus, technically, not unlawful. Palestine has no civil rights laws that protect LGBT people from discrimination or harassment.

In the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, gays have been killed by either Hamas or their own families, and even a Hamas commander, as reported by the New York Times, was killed at least in part because he was gay.

The UNFPA also reports that “Gender Based Violence (GBV) is a key protection concern in Palestine. According to Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) 2011 Violence Survey, an average of 37% of women are victims of GBV in Palestine; in the Gaza Strip, this percentage increases to 51%. Women in Palestine face multiple layers of violence and discrimination.” Of course the website blames this not on Islamic culture, but on “traditional patriarchal norms and values” and on “the occupation and its consequences” (Islam isn’t mentioned at all, and I’m not quite sure how the occupation leads to gender-based violence since many other Islamic countries that aren’t occupied oppress or even execute gay people).

Women in Palestine are often subject to oppressive sharia law, including grossly asymmetrical divorce laws, for Palestinian law is explicitly based on Islamic law.

Finally, it’s well known that while there is a dwindling number of Christians in Gaza and the West Bank, there are either no Jews or almost no Jews in Palestine (I’m not aware of any, but there may be one or two closeted Jews who would be killed if they were outed). In contrast, nearly 18% of Israelis are Muslims, and Israel harbors many Christians and members of other faiths. Atheists, too, are discriminated against in Palestine, while many Israelis (perhaps most) are nonbelievers. I have to add the caveat that I am not a complete supporter of Israel’s or Netanyahu’s policies, but on this issue—gay rights, women’s rights, and religious rights—the demonization of Israel and extolling of Palestine is ridiculous.

In short, you have to be blind or an idiot to think that Palestine is more friendly to gays or women than is Israel, which has a thriving gay community and much stronger protection of women’s and gay rights. And of course Israel is loaded with atheists.

The position of the organizers of the Dyke March, which tacitly celebrates a territory that openly oppresses women and Muslims, can be understood only by the festering anti-Semitism of the Left. Why? Because the Left traditionally sides with underdogs, and they perceive Palestinians to be far more underdoggish than are Jews. This is why gays side with cultures that demonize and kill them rather than with cultures that tolerate or even celebrate them.

 

h/t: cesar

 

Anti-Semitism of the day: Chicago lesbians ban “Jewish pride” flag from their Dyke March

June 25, 2017 • 10:45 am

I am deeply ashamed of Chicago’s gay community today.

From both the left-wing Israel paper Haaretz and the Windy City Media Group, we get a disturbing report: at yesterday’s “Dyke March” in Chicago, a parade celebrating lesbian and LGBT pride and achievements, Jewish lesbians carrying the “Jewish pride” flag were asked to leave.  Why? Because the flag “triggered” some of the participants, and apparently because some participants considered the march implicitly “anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian”. Here, from Pink News, is what the Jewish Pride flag looks like. It’s basically the Gay Pride flag with a star of David on it, a symbol of Judaism. Note that it is not the Israeli flag. (These pictures are from the annual Gay Pride Parade in Tel Aviv; photos by Jack Guez):


What went down? Let the Jewish lesbians speak, as reported in Windy City Media:

. . . .asked to leave by Collective members of the Dyke march were three people carrying Jewish Pride flags (a rainbow flag with a Star of David in the center).

According to one of those individuals—A Wider Bridge Midwest Manager Laurel Grauer—she and her friends were approached a number of times in the park because they were holding the flag.

“It was a flag from my congregation which celebrates my queer, Jewish identity which I have done for over a decade marching in the Dyke March with the same flag,” she told Windy City Times.

She added that she lost count of the number of people who harassed her.

One Dyke March collective member asked by Windy City Times for a response, said the women were told to leave because the flags “made people feel unsafe,” that the march was “anti-Zionist” and “pro-Palestinian.”

“They were telling me to leave because my flag was a trigger to people that they found offensive,” Grauer said. “Prior to this [march] I had never been harassed or asked to leave and I had always carried the flag with me.”

Another of those individuals asked to leave was an Iranian Jew Eleanor Shoshany-Anderson.

“I was here as a proud Jew in all of my identities,” Shoshany-Anderson asserted. “The Dyke March is supposed to be intersectional. I don’t know why my identity is excluded from that. I fell that, as a Jew, I am not welcome here.”

As of time of midnight Saturday, Windy City Times received no official statement from Dyke March organizers. However, social media posts in support of their decision claimed that a rainbow flag with a Star of David is a form of pink washing (a theory postulated by a City University of New York professor which claims that Israeli support of LGBTQ communities is designed to detract attention from civil and human rights abuses of Palestinian people.)

What a crock! Can you actually believe those people who found a gay pride flag with a Star of David “triggering” or, worse, “made them feel unsafe”? That’s crap, of course: the reason the flagbearers were asked to leave is because Israel is demonized as an “apartheid state” by many on the Ctrl-Left. But that’s just a cover for the anti-Semitism implicit (and explicit) in “anti-Zionism”. Further, the flagbearers weren’t Israeli, but Americans and Iranians!

Sadly, I read this as anti-Semitism on the part of the gay and lesbian community. The flag was a Gay Pride flag with a Star of David, not an Israeli flag, though you could, I suppose, say that it was a “pinkwashed” Israeli flag. But the bearers said it symbolized their Judaism and their lesbian pride, not a jingoistic pride in Israel.

The Star of David has always been a universal symbol if Judaism, used by Jews on their Torah covers, menorahs, and worn around their necks well before 1948 —and, on armbands and patches, was used to mark people as Jews under the Nazis. Putting it on a Gay Pride flag should raise no alarums—unless you’re anti-Semitic.

Further, the attitude that Israel has no right to exist, as espoused by leaders of the BDS movement and those who call themselves anti-Zionists, is also anti-Semitic. The singling out of Israel as the most demonic and oppressive of states, to the extent that even a Jewish Pride flag can be “triggering” since it’s seen as “pro-Zionist” and “anti-Palestinian— is also anti-Semitic, as there are nations in the same region that are not only more oppressive, but where homosexuality is a capital offense! But apparently to the Left those countries get a pass, for they’re inhabited by people of color. Try being a gay in Iran or Afghanistan or Palestine, or waving a “Jewish pride” flag in Kabul or Baghdad! You’d probably wind up dead.

The “pinkwashing” canard is equally ridiculous: Israelis really do favor and have gay rights, and many Muslim countries don’t. To excuse that, gays and Leftists claim that Israel’s gay-friendliness is a ruse concocted by the government to falsely show its liberalism and hide its “apartheid” policies. That’s a risible conspiracy theory. The more parsimonious explanation, and one supported by the data, is that Israelis really do have a liberal stance on gays.

What this shows is that the gay community, at least in Chicago, has bought fully into identity politics, to the extent that those who are Jewish must hide their identity lest they “trigger” others. And, without any evidence, the lesbians asked to were automatically assumed to accept (and endorse) the policies of the Israeli government. Even flaunting the Star of David is enough to trigger someone, though I suppose it was perfectly okay to wave the flags of Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan, all of which all bear Islamic symbols. I wonder how an “Iranian Pride” flag would have fared?

And so we learn that there is anti-Semitism in Chicago’s gay community, that being gay ranks higher than being Jewish on the “oppressed” hierarchy, and that gays can be just as intolerant as Saudi Muslims when it comes to Jews.

I’m in full sympathy with gay people’s struggle for their rights and for societal acceptance, but I condemn in the strongest possible terms this expression of—yes, let’s call it what it is—anti-Semitism.

h/t: Orli