After the killings at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, I tried in vain to convince somervilletom and mike-cote that it was more than old-school racism and hatred fueled by right-wing speech against Muslims who “hate our freedom,” it was also fueled by left-wing speech against Muslims and other religions who believe in traditional marriage and “hate gays and women.”
Here was my attempt, with mike-cote’s stubborn response:
Not just the GOP
It’s true that it’s been GOP people like Michelle Bachmann who have raised a paranoid alarm about Muslim infiltration into government, etc, but their worries are backed up and eagerly agreed to by Democrats who call social conservatives the “American Taliban” and say that opposition to gay marriage is a form of sharia law. It’s Libertarians in both parties who fan the flames of anti-Muslim hatred.
dont-get-cute @ Mon 6 Aug 2:13 PM
Pathetically Wrong
Show a single news report of someone being killed for being hetero or being opposed to marriage equality. There are none, but without even trying there a dozens of stories of gay men and women and people just perceived as gay that are attached all the time in America, and your pathetic need to play “The Victim” at anything even close to that is laughable. No body likes me, everybody hates me, think I’ll eat some worms…
mike_cote @ Mon 6 Aug 2:30 PM
Reply
Well, it took a couple weeks, but now I can show you a single news report of someone trying to kill people for being opposed to marriage equality, or as the deranged individual said, their “politics” in general. I’m sure you’ve seen the story, in spite of it not being discussed on this blog so far, so I won’t participate in your charade by blockquoting any of the details. I know you all know all about it. The only reference to “Family Research Council” I saw recently was tudor586 writing about the “kiss-in” at the Chick-Fil-A in Burlington, which as he proudly notes, got lots of coverage:
The American Family Association (“AFA”) and the Family Research Council, both Southern Poverty Law Center designated hate groups, also receive Chick-Fil-A dollars and have close ties to those calling for the execution of gay people in Africa. The AFA advocates imprisonment of gay people who engage in “sodomy” in the United States.
Coverage of the kiss-in in Burlington has been extensive.
You guys seem to be in deep denial about this incident and your culpability and irresponsibility. I think it should be an occasion for serious reflection, and not shameful doubling down. I hope BMG commenters won’t degrade themselves with stupid comments such as one I found at the story above: “Those who perpetuate hate through bigotry, homophobia and racism are responsible when retaliation comes there way.” That is a really scary sentiment that needs to be repudiated by responsible people on the left, who really need to ratchet down the rhetoric and stop putting marriage equality and post-genderism ahead of every other priority.
SomervilleTom says
I hope this suffices (from your article):
It is perhaps a mistake to lump mike_cote comments together with mine. The claim I make is that the hate-filled rhetoric of the right-wing drastically increases the likelihood of violence from both sides.
While there are extremists on all sides of virtually every issue, this campaign has been remarkable for the extent to which the mainstream GOP has embraced this awful rhetoric. Rick Santorum was not just some random right-wing crazy, he was a serious contender for the GOP nomination for President. At one time, so was Michelle Bachmann. The newsletters published by Rand Paul were outrageously racist, and he too was (for a time) a contender for the GOP nomination. The rubbish broadcast by Fox News is not some leaflet distributed to 13 people in the middle of nowhere, it is a major broadcast outlet and is the publicity arm of the GOP.
Filling our society with this kind of hate-speech is spreading kerosene on the floor. Those who intentionally pour that fuel are just as responsible for the resulting conflagration as the “isolated individual” who strikes the match.
Finally, in the spirit of intellectual rigor, supporting or opposing gay marriage is NOT the same as supporting or opposing religion. When religious groups attempt to impose their bizarre superstitions on the rest of us, blocking those actions is not in any way an attack on their religion.
An “attack on religion” is, for example, destroying a house of worship or imprisoning adherents because they profess a particular faith. That is NOT what is happening here.
dont-get-cute says
So you are agreeing with the guy who said they should expect retaliation for opposing gay marriage and the homosexual agenda in general. It’s not enough just to utterly reject and condemn such violence, no, it doesn’t suffice. You have to stop saying people who oppose gay marriage are hateful bigots, and certainly not say they should expect retaliation for their politics. They aren’t wrong, you are wrong.
Mark L. Bail says
bigots? How about calling hateful racists racist? Can’t hurt people’s feelings or then they’ll commit bigoted, racist acts.
mike_cote says
The FRC is not simply as you say:
They are supporting countries in Africa to execute their Gays and Lesbians and calling for the imprisonment of them here in the USA.
The FRC and those “hate-filled” bigots who support them and hate groups similar to the FRC are hateful bigots.
“Cause you are, Blanche, you are.” 10 points if you can identify the quote. And George Costanza doesn’t count.
dont-get-cute says
Found it, from the movie Whatever Happened To Baby Jane. It’s “But you are” not “cause you are.” Not sure what you mean when you quote it to me, or why it is such a popular quote on lgbt websites. Do you think people are being cruel to gay people in that same manner, torturing them when they are stuck in a wheel chair? Explain the metaphor, please. I’m sorry if it feels cruel to say that same-sex couples are not equal and should not have equal marriage rights, it’s not my intention to be cruel.
And I don’t think the FRC takes those positions, and even if they did at some point say something like that, isn’t it better to ignore rather than publicize it? I don’t think that is their primary message.
mike_cote says
In my opinion, you are hopeless. You tell lies and spread worthless propoganda, and then cry when some says you are a bigot, cause you are, Blanche, you are. Not because you do not believe in Marriage Equality, because you believe you have the right to impose your own religious beliefs on everyone else through government mandate, and you defend worthy garbage organizations like the FRC. I am done with you and your Trolling.
kbusch says
This one rather isolated incident doesn’t prove your point at all. Actually the opposite. Do we think the Sikh attacker would attack the FRC? Do we think the FRC attacker would attack the temple?
No and no.
You might just as well suggest that if the two had practiced dianetics no problem would have occurred.
dont-get-cute says
Both attackers got their righteous justification from the left, against people who believe in traditional marriage and religion.
mike_cote says
Or provide a link to quotations from the two shooters. As far as I can see, you are simply projecting your “own hatred” onto these two shooters to justify your warped world view.
SomervilleTom says
Please take this crap somewhere else.
mike_cote says
The FRC is not a religion, nor is it heterosexual.
1) It is a lobbying group like any other DC based lobbying group trying to get the government to do its bidding and raise funds off of hate.
2) Among its goals is to promote foreign countries to execute their gay and lesbian citizens and to imprison them here in the US. That doesn’t make them hetero, that makes them obsessed with sex.
Hating and denigrating gay people is not the definition of being “Hetero”, so once again, your claim that someone was gunned down for being “Hetero” in the original post is demonstratably wrong.
Geez: Last week it was gays and Feminist driving the Wisconsin Shooter to kill, and now its “Angry and Pissed Off Gays” attacking “All Religion”.
kbusch says
I bet someone here is a veneer-covered libertarian. Who is it?
jconway says
Libertarians are not only open about their beliefs they are obnoxiously proud of them. I have never met a libertarian who didn’t mention they were at least every five minutes in a conversation.
kbusch says
apparently believes that there are surreptitious ones hiding out among liberals, but my experience of libertarians agrees with yours.
I think dgc’s definition of “libertarian” is “not bioconservative”. If you define your terms in an extra special way so that “libertarian” doesn’t have to refer to actual libertarians then you can make all sorts of colorful assertions with emphasis and urgency.
dont-get-cute says
I’m not talking about the small but growing number of people who identify as libertarians and make it a point to take the libertarian position on every issue. Besides, even those guys say they want some laws and government, they aren’t anarchists. I’m talking about the much larger number of people who think “libertarians” are jerks and so don’t identify as one of them, but who nevertheless have a basic underlying libertarian belief that they should be free to do what they want without the government telling them they can’t. It’s just that they aren’t foolish enough to try to apply it to everything, but it’s generally only other people who shouldn’t be allowed to do that they want. It’s rare for someone to say that anything they might want to do should be illegal, and they justify their demand on libertarian grounds.
I don’t think the definition of either is “not the other”, but one cannot be both, and everyone has to decide to allow or prohibit same-sex reproduction and other genetic engineering technologies, which puts them into on or the other camp.
kbusch says
Liberals have a very strong notion of balancing rights. That’s, for example, how almost all liberals think about gun control, in turns of social goods and trade-offs of human needs and individual liberties. To say that liberals think about individual rights and that constitutes some kind of unacknowledged libertarianism is just an irresponsible misunderstanding of what liberalism is about.
The whole strict father/nurturing parent distinction Lakoff makes fairly well defines the differences between conservatives and liberals. It fits a lot of the evidence and libertarians fall neatly into a variant of strict father. They are not liberals and liberals are not close to being liberals.
Recent studies of political beliefs, particularly members of Congress, completely disprove your happy hope that the world is somehow divided between libertarians & bio-conservatives to the same extent it is between liberals & conservatives. That does not fit the facts. Social liberalism and environmentalism are highly correlated, so too social conservatism and global warming denialism. If those results came out differently you’d have a case. You don’t. The country fits pretty neatly on a left-right scale. (I find that surprising, but there you are.)
dont-get-cute says
first of all, this post is about how calling religious people hateful bigots who deny civil rights encourages deadly violence by unhinged individuals. I don’t know why you brought up libertarianism and bioconservativism here, except to avoid discussing the effects of the hatred and intolerance against social conservatives, who are also bio-conservatives. I guess you are part of the effort to peel away social conservatives from being bioconservative before they have a chance to realize, by trying to make them think conservatives are libertarians. But conservatives are not libertarians, they cannot be. Libertarians MUST be libertarian transhumanists, or else they stop being libertarian, and transhumanism is the opposite of conservatism. Conservatives must be bioconservative, or els they stop being conservative. There are bioconservatives and social conservatives on the left, in the Democratic party, though they are kept muzzled in the basement (often they are Catholics, fiscal liberal social justice responsible family oriented people).
kbusch says
What your rhetoric encourages:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/two-dead-81-injured-as-nail-bomb-blasts-gay-pub-in-soho-1096580.html
http://www.lgbthatecrimes.org/doku.php/otherside_lounge
Give me a break. Your prejudices dressed up in fancy, meaningless, and inscrutable rationalizations have caused far more death and suffering than some sort of mystery political force that ties people who on the face of it are political enemies.
dont-get-cute says
You’re right that there has been far more violence against gays than against religious people, I never claimed otherwise. But if that was your way of admiting, finally, that angry rhetoric from the left does cause some violence against religious people and supporters of traditional marriage and sexual morality, then that’s a marked improvement and maybe somerviletom and mike_cote will follow suit. They really need to understand that calling people hateful bigots with such righteous anger and indignation can cause some deranged individuals to act on their invitation. I worry though that they seem to think that their side is losing the violence game and more violence is called for to even the score.
My own rhetoric doesn’t encourage violence. My rhetoric is aimed at peacefully resolving the marriage debate and ending the divisiveness in a way that removes the threats that people feel justify violence.
Mr. Lynne says
… is way out of proportion to the actual balance of the rhetoric out there. This belies that what you’re allegedly interested in isn’t actually so.
The hate group designations of the SPLC are 100% appropriate and defensible.
jconway says
Dont get cute sounds awfully similar to purple mass groups John Howard and his sperm and egg amendment clap trap. At dgc is against gm foods, genetic engineering, cloning, and other things of that sort. I guess we have a common enemy in Monsanto, I don’t see how gays or female reproductive rights are an equivalent threat to the bio dome of planet Earth but I’ll take any ally in the environmental fight I can. I hope dgc is against anthropomorphic climate change as well, good bio conservatives should want to prevent libertine industries from corrupting our pure planet in that regard as well. Also unlike individual sexual behavior government can effectively regulate that kind of bio conservatism
kbusch says
This is easily proved, by the way. Go to Red Mass Group. Go to Advanced Search. Search for “bioconservatism”. You’ll find the same melange of nonsense dispensed here in the same language.
I took the blockquote above from one of John Howard’s posts. You see it was a trap. DGC fell for it. DGC is John Howard.
Mark L. Bail says
If you can connect DGC to The Last Horseman, my respect for you will transform to out and out admiration.
Check out the Egg and Sperm site.
mike_cote says
Near as I can tell through dozens of posts and comments, you are now trying to say that “There is Anti-Religious Violence”. I concede that point.
However, prior to this post, your claims were that it is left wing hatred from Feminist and Gays that is driving the violence. And that you have not shown yet, by any metric.
The guy who shot up the guard at the FRC was not doing so because the FRC is a random heterosexual casually walking down the street and happened to cross paths with the lunatic, the FRC was a ligthning rod for anti-gay hatred as the Southern Poverty Council (sp?) rightly identified.
So you want an admission that the violence exists. Sure. Fine. Whatever. Your primary theory that it is CAUSED BY Feminists and Gays is what I dispute.
mike_cote says
Sorry: Southern Poverty Law Council. Brain Fart obviously.