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Fascist Queer Makes Empty Threats

Posted by libhom Sunday, October 19, 2008

If you are unfamiliar with Dale Carpenter, he is a extreme right Republican who also is gay. He has gotten a lot of attention over the years by attacking and sabotaging the GLBT movement while pretend to fight for it. This year, some of us in the queer community have started fighting back against homohating queers like Carpenter who promote discrimination and violence against us by supporting the GOP and its most hateful candidates.

Some of us have deleted our Manhunt profiles in response to the revelation that one of the owners has been attacking and endangering us by supporting the Republican Party for years. Some activists have outed Mark Buse, chief of staff of viciously heterosexist Senator John "Keating Five" McCain.

Now, Carpenter has decided to throw a tantrum because people aren't going along with his bullshit anymore. (Hat tip to Wayne Besen.) Carpenter's exercise in narcissism had the ironic title, "Goodbye to the GLBT Movement."

A heterosexual supremacist like Carpenter provides the reader with some fine whine. (The bolding is mine to help illustrate a point farther down.)

Time and again gay conservatives have been called self-hating, treasonous, and selfish. It’s the worst vitriol against gay conservatives I’ve seen in fifteen years in this movement.

The co-founder of Manhunt was forced to resign from the company's Board of Directors because he dared to make a campaign contribution to John McCain, which started talk of a boycott against the company. People are free to boycott companies if they want to, but the fact that supporting McCain was seen as worthy of a boycott is deeply disturbing. The GLBT movement does not tolerate such dissent. What’s next, banning conservative columnists from gay newspapers?

The criticism of racist, misogynistic, heterosexual supremacist, AIDSphobic, and Christian supremacist bigots is dissent in the queer press, given how advertiser driven it is. It is dissent in self-loathing organizations like the Human Rights Campaign who have become so dependent on wealthy Republicans donors that they are too afraid to challenge GOP heterosexism in a substantial manner. Our movement has been hijacked by far right bigots like Carpenter, and they actually think they are entitled to their vastly disproportionate power.

They have got to be kidding.

I should note that Carpenter is employing a rhetorical ploy that originated with the Ku Klux Klan and was adopted later by other Christian Right hate groups. Carpenter actually is saying that it is intolerant to speak out against intolerance. Given that the GOP shares the same values as these hate groups, I'm hardly surprised that a fanatical Republican like Carpenter is using these tactics. However, it is important to point out the bullshit tactics that the extreme right uses to manipulate political discourse.

Carpenter always avoids a central fact that undermines his case. There is literally no way to support the GOP without promoting discrimination, violence, and death against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. Carpenter's support for the GOP makes him share personal responsibility for every heterosexist hate crime, for all instances where people are fired or passed over for promotions because they are queer, and for every time a young person is thrown out of her or his home by heterosexist parents who decide to hate their own child for being queer. Carpenter's support for the Republican Party also makes him personally responsible for the overwhelming majority of AIDS deaths in this country. This is equally true of every Republican. These are unpleasant facts, but they are facts we really need to face as a queer community.

Carpenter also wants to exclude transgender queers from a movement they have participated in long before Carpenter started working against it.
True, we share same-sex attraction. But even that has been diluted with the addition of transgendered causes. Indeed, the insistence of movement leaders on “T” inclusion even at the cost of passing pro-gay legislation has only highlighted major conceptual differences between gay conservatives and leftists about what exactly we’re fighting for.

Carpenter also shows his contempt for women. Opposing the fundamental right of women to choose on abortion is misogynistic. Also, Carpenter's position is hypocritical, given that he thinks gay, white, Christian men should fight only for themselves and everyone else can basically fuck themselves.
The gay left supports abortion and believes it is intimately tied to gay rights. Gay conservatives either oppose it or think it is simply not a gay issue.

A decent, honorable human being would support civil rights for everyone, rather than demand them exclusively for himself or herself.

Carpenter also inspires some hardy belly laughs by threatening to leave a movement he has been working to undermine and sabotage for years.
It is time for gay conservatives to declare independence from the GLBT movement. We’ll still make common cause at times. Gay conservatives will continue to fight government-sponsored discrimination.

Actually, they will continue to promote government sponsored discrimination by supporting the GOP and heterosexist candidates while launching shrill attacks against anyone who actually fights for queer liberation.

In the end, I suspect that this whole whineathon is an empty threat. Carpenter gets a lot of chances to work for his potpourri or prejudices by pretending to be part of the LGBT movement. I doubt that he will give it up just because he is getting some long overdue criticism for his reprehensible behavior.

I should also note that the name of the website that Carpenter posts on, "The Independent Gay Forum," is misleading. That certainly is not a site for political independents. It is a site for rabidly partisan Republicans who are on the extreme ideological right wing of the country, not just the queer community.

This is another common rightist distortion. They create misleading organizations among oppressed communities in our society, all called "independent." Never mind that these organizations are run by and participated in by people who are completely ideologically dependent on the views of people who have taught them to despise themselves merely for being who they naturally are.

 

6 comments

  1. JayV Says:
  2. Wow, thanks for this. First I'd heard. Didn't know about the Rethug/MH connection, either.
    Never could understand how a queer person could be a Republican, after the less-than-acceptable (I'm being sarcastic) treatment of marginalised people by the GOP.

     
  3. Christopher Says:
  4. The study of individuals who internalize hatred from the dominant, larger group is interesting and not unique to conservative gays.

    African Americans, Hispanics and Asians are found to exhibit this behavior too.

    The notion that queers would embrace the values of the GOP is unnerving and more than a little troubling.

     
  5. Thanks for another thought-provoking post...

     
  6. i have wanted to delete my manhunt account over this guy donating to mccain and now because they dont donate to no on 8.

    how do i delete it? i cant figure this out.

     
  7. libhom Says:
  8. Queers United: There was no option in the menus to delete profiles. I had to use the contact technical support option. I decided to help them make up their minds by changing the subject of my profileto "Please delete this profile." I changed the text to a polite explanation of why I wanted it taken down.

     
  9. I was also thinking of contacting tech support, not to mention their website sucks. I like glee.com and connexion.org much better. I heard they only donated 10k to no on 8. I don't even know if that is true. Should we start a campaign to get our readers to tell manhunt to donate or is that not our place?

     

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