The New Tolerance Campaign is a weird little right-wing organization founded by Log Cabin Republicans who are claiming to be “tolerant”, but their entire raison d’etre is to hate Muslims and anything “woke”. They are also hating on gay people who think Palestinians don’t deserve to be killed.
They have a Hate Map page that lists all the organizations across the country that they hate. Antifa, they hate. Muslim student associations, they hate. Socialists, they hate. Multiple chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace, they hate (because they’re anti-Semitic, obviously). You get the idea. This organization is run by people so twisted by hatred for Muslims in general and Palestinians in particular that they have put every faintly left-wing organization on a List.
They’ve also come up with a stunt.
The New Tolerance Campaign has secured $1,000,000 to underwrite expenses for an LGBTQ Pride Parade in Gaza or the West Bank!
Oh, wait. It’s not a publicity stunt. We know this because they say so.
This isn’t a joke. It’s not a publicity stunt. Our offer is real.
It’s absolutely insane, though, and reflects a lack of understanding and empathy on the part of the New Tolerance Campaign. They are incapable of comprehending the idea that people can simultaneously recognize that people living in a conservative, patriarchal culture or following a religion that is antithetical to LGBTQ values are not on their side, and that those people don’t deserve to die for their beliefs. You can believe that the best approach to dealing with a group that contains many misogynists and homophobes is education, coexistence, and, you know, tolerance, while recognizing that they do not share your goals.
I don’t know what the New Tolerance Campaign expects to demonstrate with this PR stunt (which is what it actually is). That LGBTQ people are actually aware that some people have ideological values that harm LGBTQ people? I think they’re already very aware of that. But maybe, just maybe, they’re capable of empathizing with other groups that are being oppressed and persecuted, and are able to allow them to live.
Maybe they’re also smart enough to realize that the West Bank and Gaza are free-fire zones for the IDF, and taking a walk with banners and flags is a good way to get a bomb dropped on you. Also maybe they can see that this is a relatively trivial cause to throw in the face of people who are being bombed, who might resent a stupid parade through the ruins of their homes.
The balancing act is this:
No, being a Muslim should not be a death penalty offense; and
At least some Muslims are attempting to export radical Islam to the rest of the world, and willing to use terrorism to make it happen, and it’s not Islamophobia to recognize that reality; and
Such people are immune to sweet reason and education, just as radical Christianists are immune to sweet reason and education. Same dynamic, different religious crackpottery; and
A certain amount of brute force is going to be necessary in self defense against such people; and
No more brute force than is necessary should actually be used.
Now, that’s one hell of a balancing act, so it’s hardly surprising that hardly anybody does it well.
It’s like when people like Dawkins “Dear Muslima” or tell you to go “over there” to fix a problem that one is working on here. But it’s combined with associating Palestinians with bigotry here.
So they can simultaneously try to tell you to shut up about bigotry against LGBT+ people here, and make Palestinians look bad.
This isn’t JUST a publicity stunt; it’s just one more tentacle of plutocratic-Republicans’ long-running propaganda campaign to keep their enemies/intended victims divided against each other and thus unable to unite against them. “LGBT+ people vs. Palestinians” is just the latest of MANY wedges they’re trying to drive into the rest of us, along with “gays vs. trans”, “Blacks vs. Jews”, “Jews vs. liberals”, “women’s rights vs. trans”, “abused women vs. abused transwomen”, “Whites vs. Hatians”, etc. etc.
I suggest someone take a good look at who the Log Cabin Boys have been hobnobbing with lately, and maybe where their money is coming from. Notice how they reappeared out of relative obscurity to start flogging this idea? Offhand, I suspect we’d find some significant contributions from AIPAC or adjacent pressure-groups.
Not it will ever happen, but It’d be a win-win regardless of the outcome.
If violence does break out the right will claim “See libs, your precious Muslim savages hate LGBTQ folks, you hypocrites!”
If violence doesn’t’ break out the right will claim “See libs, your precious degenerate queermosexuals are disrespecting the Islamic faith and their traditions, you hypocrites!
As Roy Cohen taught Trump “No matter what the outcome, always claim victory.”
LGBTQ Palestinians exist and are equally vulnerable to bombs and bullets
which is to say, i don’t appreciate queerwashing genocide, and i don’t appreciate any claim or implication that queer liberation is a goal of the israeli state. try being openly queer anywhere in israel other than tel aviv, go ahead
Whenever I see one of these shit for brains takes it makes me think of the comic if the two Muslim coded people being bombed by a drone saying “did you hear the next one will be sent by a woman?!? We live in such wonderful times!”
This doesn’t even make sense as a PR stunt.
Let hold a parade in Gaza and try to get killed? Let’s ignore the actual violence being committed by Israel because har-har, is it funny to mock those clearly inferior brown people?
If any of them survive Gaza, they could go hold a parade in Kursk too, just to demonstrate their tolerance and their racial superiority over all those bombs.
This stunt falls is merely a slightly more elaborate iteration of a tired old right wing Xtian trope which basically boils down to them confessing how envious they are of the Islamists who (they imagine) have the power to murder every single queer person in every single Muslim-majority country. It’s death threats with plausible deniability. “See these guys want to kill you, which is why you should fall in line with OUR rules!”
@Sally Strange:
Yeah. “We don’t want to kill you, we just want to beat you up until you’re willing to pretend to not exist so we can continue to feel morally superior without having to face the fact that we actually do want to kill you, we just don’t want to go to jail for it.”
@10: Or maybe “We want to kill you, but we’re good civilized Christians, which means we need an excuse to kill you, so that makes us better than those swarthy heathen savages who don’t need any excuse to kill you, so you better support us ‘cuz we’re more tolerant than they are…just as long as you don’t give us any excuses to kill you!”
That ship has sailed. The West (US, Israel, EU) has used way more force than is necessary and, consequently, has likely made the problem of radicalization far worse than it would’ve been otherwise.
People tend to react badly when their home containing their entire family is blown up.
In the news:
what the fuck is sweet reason anyway
stop the planet i want to get off
Remind me again why anyone is supposed to take the LGBTQ wing of America’s most prominent anti-LGBTQ organization seriously?
This is currently a trope in conservative circles. They’ve seen how many queer people support Palestine and are trying to do basic divide and conquer tactics. It says a lot that they are doing this in Gaza rather than a trans pride parade in Florida
The chutzpah for them to call their odious little organisation the New Tolerance Campaign when they haven’t the first notion of what tolerance means is making my head spin.
cartomancer@16–
QFT. I fail to understand why there are any Log Cabin Republicans left after Reagan’s HIV policies. It’s like, sure you might get sightly lower taxes, but the power brokers in the Republican Party want you dead. As for this ‘New Tolerance’ wedging BS, I’m not even convinced they represent any gay people at all and suspect it’s just a party front calling itself Log Cabin to deflect criticism.
@chrislawson: many LGBT+ people, just like normal humans, also need to hate others to feel content with themselves.
You’d think that being a persecuted minority would give them some insight, and most of LGBT+ people do get plenty of that.
But some assholes just escape that.
Their job is not to provide reasons, or sound policy.
Their job is to provide very loud /rationalizations/ for people who accept the conclusions of a reasoning without caring too much about the validity of the reasoning.
Are they morally bankrupt, counterproductive to their stated aims and simply batshit insane? Yes, but no one cares about that.
Cruelty is the point.
I don’t know any LT (B & Q is too broad to broach) people involved in Log Cabin Republicans but I do know several Gs. In my lifetime as an out and proud dyke, the very worst humans I’ve encountered were gay men. Don’t get me wrong, my very best friends are gay men, of a different ilk; it’s the privileged jackass gay men that ruin it for all of us. Peter Thiel, anyone? They have never been turned down for a job because they were too gay-presenting.
I was involved in the very first Gay Pride “parade” in Phoenix when I was a teenager and was arrested at 16. In the years after, I was shot at three times, hit only once, egged regularly, and beaten up by anuses waiting outside lesbian bars until I finally moved to San Francisco in 1987 and dealt with Reagan’s massacre of gay men. Yeah, try to have a gay pride parade in Gaza. What a foolish goal. The U.S. is still a mess for LGBTQ people, especially T. This pisses me off so much.
awomanofnoimportance @ 1
It is amazing that the awful Dubya was somewhat more tolerant towards muslims than the log cabin Republicans.
birgerjohansson, No. 23, I have read multiple accounts that the awful Dubya didn’t have much in the way of personal prejudices; all he really cared about was making money and reducing the size of government. But he had both gay and trans friends of long standing, so his opposition to gay marriage was entirely political. The politically smart thing to do at the time was to throw gay people to the wolves, so that’s what he did.
And for my harsh criticism of him for starting wars, I do think he deserves credit for going out of his way to calm anti-Muslim sentiment after 9/11. Imagine if Trump had been president then. Every mosque in the country would have burned to the ground.
Try to have an LGBTQ Pride Parade in any small town in Texas, Florida, or the deep South.
You probably won’t get a permit.
If you do get a permit, the number of people yelling at you will outnumber the people in the march by a lot.
For extra excitement, try to picket a gay hating fundie mega church.
Oh, and say hello to the Patriot Front when they show up for your Pride Parade with weapons and masks.
At one time, the Log Cabin Republicans weren’t even invited to the annual GOP hate festival called CPAC.
These guys are delusional hypocrites.
Most of the GOP openly hates them and discriminates against them when they can.
The Log Cabin GOP doesn’t have to go to Gaza or the West Bank to make their point that fundie religious people hate them.
Any small town in much of the USA will work as well. The food is better (Gaza cuisine leans heavily on UN famine relief staples), and they are easier to get to.
It’s just another version of “Let’s you and him fight,” which has been the operating political thesis of the GOP for the last 30 years.
This makes me think of the “Queer” anti trans hate groups in terfisland that had their membership rolls leaked and were like 95% just straight people.
Real “hello fellow queers” energy.
@22. Dagmar Dollmaier : Respect.
@27. raven : “Gaza cuisine leans heavily on UN famine relief staples.”
FWIW I did a wiki-check & whilst I have never eaten specifcally Palestinan food & do not know of any Palestinian restaurants that serve it locally (or globally really personally) :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_cuisine#Gaza
Apparently the Palestinan city of Nabulus has its own special cheese Nabulsi (or naboulsi) too : (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabulsi_cheese ) with other places having their own regional specialities and AJ has this 5 mins long clip on Saving Palestine’s Forgotten Food
featuring chef Mirna Bamieh
StevoR, things have changed in Gaza lately.
These days, Gaza citizens aren’t so concerned with what they eat as whether or not they eat at all.
They are in a human caused famine situation.
@ ^ raven : True – and Israel is stopping Gazans from going fishing in any reasonable area too.
Source : https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/23/gaza-fisherfolk-can-only-dream-of-fishing-freely-under-israels-blockade
PS ^ That was in August 2023. 23rd of. Not even after Oct 7th.
And they stole Scripps Healthcare’s logo, down to the colors.
@29 crimsonsage – My first unrequited love was a trans woman from Louisville, Kentucky named Kay Fox (“unrequited” because she was straight). In San Francisco, Gay Pride parades spanned over the weekend with the Dyke March being on Friday, the big gay event on Saturday (and then, much later, the Trans March on Sundays).
My very best dyke friends, Madeleine and Ann, were so horrible to trans women at the Dyke March. It was mortifying to me. I fought them tooth and nail when they screamed at women they perceived to be trans (maybe not even trans women); I remember hiding in bushes (because I was horrified by their ignorance and they were from Chicago, not small town) and wanting to bust them in the chops. They’re now both married to trans women, and have been for over 15 years. I went to their weddings.
Fear is a hell of a drug but I think anyone can change, even extreme transphobes. It surprises me -100% that people pretend to be queer to further their narrative.
Also, thank you StevoR. I rarely comment but have always adored your and Raven’s comments.