WHAT ISRAEL-HATERS LEARNED FROM GAY-BASHERS

EARLIER ACTIVISTS DIRTIED GOOD WORDS LIKE “FAMILY.” PALESTINIAN APOLOGISTS DEFILE WORDS LIKE “HUMAN RIGHTS,” “JUSTICE” AND “FREEDOM.”

God bless America!

It’s Pride Month — and I will be devoting some attention to topics of homophobia and LGBTQ+ rights in the context of my usual subject, antisemitism and Jewish rights. This is the first in an occasional series throughout the month. Stay tuned. It’s going to be fabulous.

In the 1970s and ’80s, the antigay movement coopted the word “family,” weaponizing it as a happy euphemism for hatred and exclusion. Family members who did not fit the narrow definitions of the religious right were, paradoxically, disqualified from inclusion in the very families these righteous defenders of the familial claimed to venerate.

People like Jerry Falwell, Anita Bryant, Pat Robertson and James Dobson vilified LGBTQ+ people (or, as we called ourselves then, “gays and lesbians” because, oh never mind …).

Did Falwell et al really believe what they were preaching? Maybe, maybe not. But golly did the war on gays ever prove a boon for their cause.

Hating gays was a fundraising goldmine. Lucre, more than Leviticus, may have been the main motivator. Constellations of religio-political movements were funded by direct mail operations that scattered panic postcards in parents’ mailboxes warning that homosexuals were coming for their children and, en passant, destroying American values. (This was mostly an American phenom, but, like everything American, it permeated the world.)

Once the money was in the door, it funded a gay-bashing coalition that could only hold together with a common existential enemy. Gay-hate was used to paper over theological divisions between conservative Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, and even some Orthodox Jews. The antigay extravaganza forged a powerful cross-denominational alliance under the “family values” umbrella that dominated American politics, in many ways, for more than a generation, and drove the careers of countless politicians. Threats of the “gay agenda” polarized Americans and herded ’phobes to the polls in droves.

The outrage stoked against gays was the fuel for an entire movement. While “traditional” marriage and keeping women in their place were core tenets, many of these policies had no connections to gender or sexual orientation. The New Right, as they were called, championed free market fundamentalism, law and order, anti-elitism, union busting, opposition to civil rights and affirmative action, limits on pro-environmental policies and a ton of things that had nothing to do with gay rights. But millions of Americans who came for the homophobia stayed for what we now call owning the libs. A massive, powerful movement of outrage upended American politics (not least with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980) and changed the face of America. And it probably couldn’t have happened without the homophobic energy that a few brilliant political operatives (some of them closeted gays themselves) identified as their society’s sleeper fear factor: homophobia.

Wailing on homosexuals was a boon in many ways. For one thing, we were small in number and our defences in the face of attacks were a bit weak and not quite as catchy as the original accusations. (“We’re not pedophiles!” is not a powerfully mobilizing slogan.)

Homophobia was ideal in framing participants in the gay-bashing as morally superior. They may cheat on their taxes, cheat on their spouses, hit their kids, hit the bottle and engage in all variation of vaguely immoral activities — but they were better than those people. They were in a battle of good-versus-evil and, whatever moral misdemeanors they perpetrated were eclipsed by the supposed Sodom into which the queers were dragging society.

All of this obsession on gay sex (because while gay people might have merely wanted civil rights, there were obvious frissons of the fleshly in the overheated messaging of the antigay groups, which often verged on the pornographic) allowed the New Right to deflect attention from policies they wanted to sneak in. As long as people were obsessing over what their neighbors were doing in their bedrooms, like some weird sex Stasi, voters could be diverted from things like equal rights for women and African-Americans, what we now call climate change, the gutting of social programs and a whole raft of issues that have nothing to do with LGBTQ+ stuff, but from which LGBTQ+ stuff successfully distracted.

Notably, the voters who were distracted from what really mattered by the sideshow barkers crying out about bearded lesbians didn’t realize they were just pawns in a larger movement that often undermined their own self-interest. Self-righteous in their certainty that, whatever their shortcomings, they were superior to the queers, mindless millions signed onto policies that took away their social supports, undermined their kids’ schools, gutted their collective bargaining rights, hurt the environment, removed guardrails from capitalism, debased the social and legal advances of women and minorities and a long list of unintended consequences. (Clarification: The consequences were fully intended by the architects of the New Right. Antigay policies were a means to an end for them. But voters fell for the bait, harming themselves and everything they cared about.)

After the advances of the civil rights era and the women’s movement, explicit racism (and, to a lesser extent maybe, explicit chauvinism) became politically intolerable. Anti-gay activism offered a socially acceptable new culture war to replace anti-integration and anti-woman rhetoric. Gays were an acceptable punching bag for the pent-up rage of racists and misogynists.

It gave white conservatives a new axis of grievance that wasn’t explicitly racial or sexist — but functioned similarly in rallying the base.

It worked wonders on many fronts, including silencing dissent. Come to the aid of the fags and you’d be accused of being one of them or being a traitor to collective values. Anyone who defended LGBTQ+ rights was painted as heretical or part of a conspiracy to undermine all things good.

Ironically, the holier-than-thou homophobes were able to tar gay people with immorality even while the leaders of the movements were engaged in all range of depravity.

In micro and macro ways, the New Right was undermining the very thing they claimed to be rescuing: the family. Most people now understand that genuine “family values” are non-judgmental and inclusive. The people who claimed to advance “family values” destroyed countless families with LGBTQ+ members and gawdknows how many lives in the process.

Now …

The progressive movement, which detests probably everything the New Right stood for, has brilliantly adopted their playbook — subbing in “Zionists” for “homosexuals.” Whether consciously or not, every strategy and message of the anti-Israel mobs echoes with the intolerance and scapegoating of the victimized community (“Zionists” but, really, as I will address: Jews) just as the antigay mobs did in an earlier era.

The “pro-Palestinian” or anti-Israel movement uses positive-sounding, emotionally resonant language (“Free Palestine!” “Justice!” “Human rights!”) to frame itself as progressive and humanitarian — even while promoting hate-fueled, eliminationist, racist and oppressive objectives.

Just as the New Right used the positive-sounding “family values” to betray the very values good families embody, now “pro-Palestinians” invoke “justice,” “human rights” and “equality” while advancing a movement that epitomizes injustice for non-Muslim minorities in Palestine, spits on human rights everywhere and guarantees inequality for women, LGBTQ+ people and minorities in Palestine and across the Arab and Muslim world.

Just as “family values” undermined actual families, the “pro-Palestinian” movement harms Palestinians. Today, in the name of “freeing Palestine,” millions march worldwide egging Hamas on to continue the fight against Zionism to the last dead Palestinian, if necessary.

But just as the end-goal of the antigay movement was less about stripping rights from LGBTQ+ people than using them as a scapegoat to distract the public while the New Right enacted a panorama of destructive policies, so too the “pro-Palestinian” movement uses Israel and — we’re not children here, so we can cut the shit — Jews as a means to stealthily invoke a larger, extremist agenda.

Most of the anti-Israel screamers don’t know they are part of a larger conspiracy, just as most of the “Moral Majority” didn’t know they were pawns in a total revamp of American society. (This is why the Stalinist term “useful idiots” has revived with such relevance today.) But they are.

What too few who jumped on the antigay bandwagon of the 1970s and ’80s asked was, who is behind this campaign, what is their ultimate agenda, and does this really align with my values?

Many of the marching millions today waving Palestinian flags and covering their faces in keffiyehs do not know what they are a part of. (Some do — but they’re smart enough to mostly keep it on the DL.)

The question is, who is behind this movement — and what do they want?

I’ll address that soon …