Morose on Gay Rights

In today's DMI blog the indefatigable Maureen Lane flagellates herself in a post about gay rights. What makes all of this fascinating reading is the fact that the entry she writes devolves from a Daily Kos commentary on the Ahmadinejad speech where the Iranian Nutcase denied that his country had any gay people.

It would seem to us that the Ahmadinejad denial might have been a perfect opportunity for the regressive left in this country to reflect on some of the things that distinguish America from the Islamic orthodoxies of the world. Our bad!

Instead, the speech led our Kossak to ruminate on, "how do our own policies deny the gay community?" Wouldn't you know it, they just can't seem to miss the opportunity to not find anything good to say about their own country-and Lane falls right into this stultifying mindset with the following mea culpa: "I have not written enough about the Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Inter-Sex, Transgender, Two Spirit, Questioning and Queer (LGBITTQQ) community and poverty. In that way, I have contributed to denying the community. When you compound discrimination, the intersection of race, sexuality and gender can be profound on people’s ability to attain economic security and to get help when they are in need."

Now let's make one thing clear, this is not a post about the absence of discrimination against gays in the United States-something we're far from expert about. The point is something quite different. There is a stark differential between the American mindset on these issues-yes even if we include evangelical Christians-and the medieval worldview espoused by radical Islam. As Bruce Bawer points out in his While Europe Slept, Jerry Falwell might have wanted to deny Bawer's marriage rights, but at least he didn't advocate stoning him to death.

All of which illustrates how the left continues to see its own country with the most jaundiced eye-and explicates why these folks would even support an Ahmadinejad over Prersident Bush. Politics has been known to make strange bedfellows but this really takes the cake. In many ways this is similar to the phenomenon that Paul Berman writes about in Terror and Liberalism, where he observed how French socialists morphed into supporters of the Nazis.

Sometimes we get so caught up in our own self-righteous disputations that we blind ourselves to some self evident truths-one in particular being that there are many less savory political environments than our own, and that there are some really evil people in the world; far more than any neocon or Republican.