Roxanne of Rox Populi is having a bit of a deja vu moment due to the remarks of your typical ultra-conservative Christian leader, who apparently enjoys dropping subtle hints of his true intention within his statement. No matter how many times he attempts to backtrack and rationalize his blatantly bigoted statement, anyone with enough common sense can see his vitriolic contempt for LGBT people, and his longing for reducing them to perhaps a status even lower than second-class citizenship. It’s simple really; ‘single out LGBT people and make them more vulnerable to discrimination, bigotry, injustice, and violence within our society’. ‘Dehumanize them with labels, armbands, and viciously homophobic rhetoric you pitifully attempt to deny, so stripping them of their civil rights and liberties won’t raise any protest from anyone–besides them.’ See, it’s easy to do. Damn, who did that too and nearly wiped out a whole race of people? Oh Roxanne…
Doomed to Repeat It
This sounds all too familiar, but I can’t really place the source of my deja vu:
The leader of a conservative Christian lobby group appears to suggest that gays should be required to wear warning labels, although he denies that was his intention.
“We put warning labels on cigarette packs because we know that smoking takes one to two years off the average life span, yet we ‘celebrate’ a lifestyle that we know spreads every kind of sexually transmitted disease and takes at least 20 years off the average life span according to the 2005 issue of the revered scientific journal Psychological Reports,” Rev. Bill Banuchi, executive director of the New York Christian Coalition told the Mid Hudson News.
Hmmm. I still can’t place where I may have heard about something like this before. Maybe one of you readers can help me out.
Via Chris.
The Rev knew exactly what he meant with his words. If you’re going to make such obnoxiously hateful statements about a group of people at least have the balls to stick with it, rather than be a coward-in-denial and run from them. If the idiot read a history book and researched WWII, namely German society at that time, I think he would understand why some of us are a wee bit pertubed with his very suggestive statement. It’s thinly-veiled but still hateful rhetoric today (oh but you whimperingly try to deny), but what will it be tomorrow? He’s just pissed because there were LGBT Pride Celebrations in New York City recently. Good for them.
I wish more people (straights and BTLGs) knew the history of the pink triangle (and the black one, for that matter). During the 60th anniversary memorials of the end of WWII, there was a picture in my city’s newspaper of a concentration camp survivor wearing his camp uniform. It had a pink triangle on it, but neither the article nor the caption made any mention of it.
The Jews have largely cornered the story of the camps. In fact, however, the Nazis were equal-opportunity oppressors, and destroyed every Christian pastor who stood up to them, gypsies, Poles, whoever, and of course homosexuals (always on everyone’s hit list).
The irony of course is that many high in the Nazi regime were homosexuals themselves.
Or maybe it’s not ironic. Isn’t it the people who are terrified of their suspicions about their own orientation who are worst on the hate front?
I’m comfortable with being straight. I have a busy life. Who has time to run off and harrass the gays, even if I were so inclined? Watch these guys, folks, they “have issues.”
The black triangle was used for all so-called asocials, and was not specifically applied to lesbians. It was also applied to Sinti/Roma (Gypsies), prostitutes, vagrants, murderers, thieves, and those who violated laws prohibiting sexual intercourse between Aryans and Jews. Paragraph 175 (the anti-homosexuality law) didn’t apply to them, as the Nazi government thought that lesbianism was alien to Aryan women. For more information, please see the US Holocaust Memorial Museum site.
*EVERY* army during WWII had homosexuals in it, and so did all the governments. There’s no point in telling people that the Nazis had homosexuals in the armed forces as if it should be some sort of shock.
I know you probably didn’t mean any harm by it, Susan, but every time someone mentions that the Nazis had homosexual members, I rememebr where the start of that propoganda push came out from: rabid anti-homosexual groups who try and portray homosexuality as linked to Nazism. It pisses me off to no end that this meme gets spread.
And then there’s the ‘takes 20 years off your life’ meme, spread that that lying )&*(%^* Paul Cameron.
It’s as if people were still running to the media with coppies of “The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion”, and the mesia were reporting it as if it were news.
So I’m pissed at the news media for printing those lies without mentioning that they are, in fact, lies. I just sent a letter to the Mid Hudson News taking them to task for printing that sort of drivel uncontensted.
In fairness… I think the statement about “warning labels on cigarettes” could have been made without any conscious intention to invoke the pink triangles. Which is not to say I think it’s it’s okay!–the fundamentalists’ belief that being gay is evil, against god, against nature, yadda yadda, is, at root, a fascist sentiment. But, if I honestly believed in it–that homosexuality is evil, that it causes people to die young–then I could imagine myself making the comparison to cigarette warning labels without it occurring to me what it would sound like.
And my point in saying so is that we have here a lovely teaching moment. This guy’s doofus remark about warning labels is a terrific opportunity to educate people about what persecution leads to. Accusing him, personally, of having a secret motive in saying what he said–that he “knew exactly what he meant with his words”–seems to me to be somewhat beside the point, if not actually counterproductive. It turns it into an argument about whether he did or didn’t intend harm; he says he didn’t, someone else says he did, blah blah blah. It seems far better to me to assume that he didn’t mean any harm–but treat it as an illuminating and illustrative slip.
What kind of rock does a person have to live under to make that kind of slip? Not like he would care or see a level of difference. The whole rant was hate speech.
The kind that was born of a woman… I shudder to think of what I have said that just didn’t come out right or was not well thought. It is disappointing that folks are scared of other folks that are scared of them. The idea of labeling anyone is scary too. Evan is right on, we have a teaching point, if we see the Rev. as what he is, a flawed human being, just maybe he will see us the same. (But, don’t count on it… Sometimes we just have to walk in faith.)
There is the other, other triangle, the one in a circle… friends of Bill.
“The kind that was born of a woman”
I don’t recall suggesting he was born of a man. Um, point?
When I said “What kind of rock does a person have to live under” I meant (in a fit of hyperbole), how out of touch with historical events does one have to be to not have heard of Nazi categorizing.
Of course he’s heard of it. Doesn’t mean he would necessarily think of it while making a boneheaded comment about what he believes to be an unhealthy activity. Like Rock, I’ve been guilty of saying things that were offensive, totally inadvertently–just failing to make the connection in my head until it had been pointed out to me. (Hasn’t that ever happened to you? I figured everybody must have something that mortifies them to remember, even years later…)
All I’m saying is that drawing people’s attention to the connection–“Warning labels, hm? You know who else thought there should be warning labels on gay people?”–seems like a more useful way to approach things than getting into an argument over whether or not he was thinking of Nazis when he said it. Especially since my suspicion is that he honestly wasn’t; I think it was just plain old garden-variety dumbness.