Anti-gay laws are inhumane
I came upon this letter several days ago. I was gratified that someone without a great personal gain in our struggle for equality would speak out for us. There are many like him. My straight friends, of course. But we also have to understand that there are many straight people in our country who does want to see us as equal citizens. I believe that. And, it’s one of the big things that keeps me going.
LEONARD PITTS JR. is a writer in the Free Press.
BY LEONARD PITTS JR.
May 4, 2005Gay Holocaust?
That was the subject line of an e-mail I received last week from “Chris,” a lawyer in a red state. He wanted to know if anybody else sees a similarity between the beginning of the Holocaust -- the nibbling away of rights and personhood that ultimately led to the attempted extermination of a people -- and what is happening to gay people in the United States.
He knows it’s far-fetched. “But,” he says, speaking of the conservative element that is pushing hardest against gay rights, “we are not dealing with normal people here.”
Chris concedes that there are differences between the plights of Jews and gays. “But they also have this in common -- at one time in history, that time being the present for gays, they were the object of official government-sponsored hatred couched in the name of religion or morals.”
The bigger offense
Here’s what I think:
The Holocaust is an atrocity unique in history, and I’m wary of appending modifiers: the “this” holocaust or the “that” holocaust.
Which is not to say the lawyer is off base. I’ve long felt the current spate of laws -- you can’t do this because you’re gay, can’t have that because you’re lesbian -- bears a discomfiting resemblance to Germany in the 1930s.
Both spring from a mindset that says a given people is so offensive to our sensibilities, that we are obliged to place them outside the circle of normal human compassion. We don’t have to hear their cries, don’t have to respect their humanity, because they are less than we -- and are responsible for everything that scares or threatens us.
Whatever it is, it’s all their fault.
Human dignity
My problem is that I see human dignity as all of a piece. I don’t know how to want it for me and mine, but not for them and theirs.
I always considered that the lesson of the Holocaust; always felt that in the largest sense, it was not about Jews and Aryans but about humanity and inhumanity. The Holocaust was hatred carried to its logical extreme, the predictable outcome of an environment where we countenance taking rights from “them,” heaping scorn on “them,” making scapegoats of “them.”
And who can deny that this describes the plight of gay Americans in 2005? Or that demagogic lawmakers are using this environment to further their own ambitions?
There used to be an expression in Southern politics. The candidate who lost because he had been found insufficiently draconian on racial issues was said to have been out-niggered. These days, the worry seems to be that one might be out-homoed. Consider, for instance, a law under consideration in Alabama to ban books with gay characters from public school libraries.
It prompted a group of gay Alabamans to rise before a legislative committee and ask a pregnant question.
Why do you hate us?
The same thing could have been asked by an Armenian in 1915, by a Bosnian Muslim in 1992, by a Rwandan in 1994 and, yes, by a Jew, in 1936.
We just don’t learn.
Ours is a stable and prosperous democracy, so no, I don’t predict train cars full of gays rolling toward death factories. Still, the mindset of aggrieved righteousness that allowed those trains to roll is not dissimilar from that which would ban books about gay people from public school libraries.
Maybe your instinct is to find the comparison unthinkable. Nobody is interning gays or mass murdering them. But ask yourself: How many would if they could?
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I read this too and wrote Mr. Pitts the following:
Dear Mr. Pitts,
I enjoyed reading your May 4 column.
I would like to point out that there has already been a "Gay Holocaust" -- the same one that killed millions of Jews in Nazi Germany.
The countless homosexuals who were slaughtered by the Nazis are often forgotten or deliberately ignored. Sadly, no one mourns for the men who where forced to wear pink triangles on their chests and then worked to death in Nazi labor camps.
You wrote: "The Holocaust is an atrocity unique in history..."
Statements like this always strike me as being somewhat arrogant. Humanity has experienced far greater modern atrocities (in terms of numbers of deaths) -- in China, Cambodia, Africa, and the
United States.
Unfortunately, yellow, brown, and red-skinned people don't seem to count in the hearts and minds of most Americans. White-skinned European Jews are simply easier for us to identify with.
While our government may be a "stable and prosperous democracy", our people not superior. Americans are prone to the same shortcomings inherent to the rest of humanity.
What I fear is that a new kind of homegrown terrorist may result from the continuing erosion of human rights for gay and lesbian Americans. Will we see gay suicide bombers targeting straight weddings? Assassinations of anti-gay politicians and religious leaders?
Unfortunately, this may not be so far-fetched. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, I became familiar with the Queer Nation movement in Los Angeles. Many of the people involved with the
group advocated violence against the government and seemed quite capable of going to such extremes. The FBI were very aware of this an monitored the group's activities closely.
Our government already has great difficulty curtailing the activities of domestic terrorist groups like the Earth Liberation Front and the various right-wing militia movements. Just imagine the kind damage a few men and women who were booted out of the Armed Forces for being gay could do with their knowledge of arms and military tactics! To what extremes would a lesbian couple in danger of losing their children go to keep their family together?
It is also very likely that the "green" terrorist groups may join forces with "radical queers" to target what they consider to be a common enemy -- the government and corporate America. There is
already quite a bit of interaction between these groups.
The U.S. could very well be heading for an era of unparalleled domestic violence -- the radical left against the radical right with everyone else caught in the middle. I hope that's not the case.
Perhaps you can explore these issues in a future column. I don't think most journalists would have the guts to write about this.
I forgot to give you the address(www.afa.net)
I was trying to think of this mans name who was running for president a few years ago,so i went to a sight that he use to be chairman,every time this man spoke a word he spoke of the homosexual agenda,the web sight is the american family association,click on homosexual agenda,and see what hate really is and where it is coming from,they can even help you to over come our homo sicknes,give me a damn break,they can take there hate filled sight and put it in there pipe and smoke it,bunch of bible thumping twits.