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Counterattack from the LGBTQ Community
We should have seen this coming; maybe some of us did. We have taken legislative action in Florida and around the country to offset the disturbing inroads that the LGBTQ community has made on the norms and values of our states and the education of our children; they are furious, and they are going to pursue even more aggressively their agendas of dominance of the culture.
What has caused the Progressives and the LGBTQ community to become so angry and fearful? Although our efforts are late in the game, we are trying to restore a mainstream approach and understanding of the meaning of equal rights and equal opportunity. Unfortunately, these communities are not concerned with fairness. They are determined to control the dialogue about, and education of, our children regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer agendas, and the passing of legislation that challenges their goals is considered anti-gay and hateful.
How have they responded to our challenges? The latest action was demonstrated a few days ago:
‘Hamilton’ creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, pop star Ricky Martin and award-winning actress/singer Michaela Jae Rodriguez joined the Hispanic Federation Tuesday to launch an advocacy initiative to serve Latinx LGBTQ+ communities.
The Advance Change Together initiative will provide 20 Latinx nonprofits grants of $25,000 to $50,000 to support their efforts and infrastructure in those communities. The Hispanic Federation, the national nonprofit dedicated to Latino empowerment, will fund the initiative with a $1 million grant for the first two years. But it hopes to encourage other donors to support and expand the program, which will also convene a summit to set a national agenda for LGBTQ+ groups.
I found this statement by Ricky Martin naïve and uninformed about the goals of the LGBTQ:
‘I am Ricky Martin. I am Latino. And I am a US citizen. I’m a father. I am a husband. And, by the way, I’m also gay,’ said the Grammy Award-winning singer and songwriter, appearing via Zoom. ‘The last one should be enough to make sure that my basic human rights are protected and respected. But they’re not. … I want all children to be able to speak openly about their own families, not to be prohibited from drawing their own family tree at school — just because of the state we live in.’
I think this statement is a sad commentary on the state of the gay community. On the one hand, Martin mentions he is gay, as if it’s an afterthought (and I completely agree it is the least important attribute on the list); then he says that being gay should guarantee his human rights, not realizing that his basic human rights are not assured through his homosexuality, but by his being an American citizen. He’s also telling us, as would many other gay activists like him, that his “gayness” should give him special status.
He’s wrong.
FL State Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith made the following statement:
Smith said it’s critically important for queer youth to see others like themselves depicted in art and literature ‘as healthy and normal residents who participate and exist in all of our schools and in all our communities.’
The tragic irony is that by singling them out for being gay, it separates them from all those people who do consider themselves to be “healthy and normal,” essentially just like everyone else. Smith is insisting that they be focused on for being different (whereas most kids just want to fit in), and is elevating them above their peers.
But the most disturbing part of the LGBTQ agenda is the transgender focus. They use false data about suicides to justify the use of gender interventions. The full report that analyzes this misuse of the data can be seen here.
I’m especially intrigued that ACT is targeting the Hispanic population with this Progressive agenda. Recent polls have been showing that the number of Hispanics supporting Republicans (and I would assume Conservative values) is steadily growing. It will be fascinating to see if and how the campaign to enlist Hispanics in the agenda for the LGBTQ community (dominated by the Left) will be affected.
It’s clear to me that legislatures and governors who are willing to push back against these activities will be castigated and condemned. I praise those people who are willing to stand up and act.
We need to assume that the Leftist activism will continue and probably escalate. Unless and until we prevent their propagandizing, mutilating, and grooming our kids, we will need to be vigilant.
Someone has to protect the children.
Published in Culture
So, even he can’t bring himself to use “Latinx.” Interesting . . .
Hispanics dislike the term, and for good reason: it’s preposterous to try to remove gender from a language as gendered as Spanish. Talk about denying people their linguistic heritage….
Look, we let the pervs out so now it is pervs all the way down until it crashes.
Nothing new about this stuff. It is biblical.
Just wondering where we will run to when God smites the country.
The problem isn’t Martin’s, or anyone else’s, sexual preference, it is the insistence that it affects or even determines one’s identity. Susan correctly identifies the problem:
Some teens, maybe many, subscribe to the notion they should receive special treatment and compete to see who can check the most boxes on the special treatment lists. Some schools humor this behavior and it destroys the student by making no demands of them as well as segregating them.
This, of course, creates resentment and bitterness from the other students, and an unspoken insistence that they be held to the same standard: none. This special treatment Congressman Smith expects can send an institution into a death spiral pretty quickly.
I don’t know why anyone would want inclusion in any group, at least when it creates assumptions or even obligations about identity. You’re set up for a lot of slight and anger because you’re required to take on the emotional responsibility of the whole group. People in situations completely different from your own will determine your emotional wellbeing. How can you be happy as a member of the group if they are not? And some will only be too happy to let you take on the burden because it gives them power over you.
Oh I do so hope that the Woke continue to flog that formulation. Nothing says “you matter to us” quite like colonizing their mother tongue. You know better than they do how they should refer to themselves.
Aa very insightful comment, Chris. They assume “inclusion” only has benefits, but forget that in the real (mainstream) world, it also has obligations. But who cares about those, right? Thanks!
Susan, well-reasoned and well-written as per your usual. We seem to have lost, as a society, the ability to function outside a binary framework. It’s us–or them. Friendship or enmity. Tolerance, I think, is a misused word that covers for a demand that we heartily approve–if we do not, then it is evidence of hate. I do not think we can reason our way out of these divisions–I think the difficult times ahead may temper some of this as we realize the need for a broader community. I hope.
In the near term, I see no solutions, either. But then I ask, how can it get much worse, Jake? Then again, I don’t really want to go down that road . . .
I think part of the strategy is to wear people who hold to traditional values down, to cause us to lose confidence in our humanity. This, we must resist, and encourage resistance. It is not hateful to recognize the harm that can come from state endorsement of things like drag shows for kids, CRT and a ‘values free’ sex education curriculum for young children.
I think we may be at peak Alphabet Soup.
They are fragmenting. It’s almost as if they are at the point of being… individuals. Their obsessive labeling and gendering has created its own problems. Soon – and I would encourage us to do this – there will be an argument about the order of the Alphabet Soup. Why does “L” come first? “T’s” have the most problems and face the most rejection. And why do the “B’s” come third? Bisexuals are half-straight, what are they complaining about?
They are running out of grievances. This is the fuel that keeps them going. Honestly I can’t see where these grants to the advocacy groups can do much damage.
BTW If Ricky Martin is as gay as he is Latino, then he might have kissed a man on the cheek once when he was drunk.
Unless they use them to organize and stoke violence. I wouldn’t put that past them.
I have a number of 20ish year old Hispanic girls that work for me.
They either did not vote or voted Biden.
None of them will vote Democrat in the near future. They are pissed about gas prices and inflation. LGBT issues are a very low concern and they despise the term Latinx.
Start by refusing to use their language. The term “gay” must be discarded and we should solely use “ homosexual” to describe them. It is hard, but once you get in the habit it gets easier.
Yes.
A trope among the woke is the idea that “misgendering” someone is “denying their existence” or “depriving them of their humanity” or something like that. It’s nonsensical: it’s no more denying someone’s existence to express skepticism about their gender self-identification than it is to express skepticism about their conviction that they are Napoleon, for example. Even people experiencing mental struggles exist and are human, and expressing skepticism about the accuracy of their viewpoint is not an assault on their status as human beings.
This canard is invoked routinely, and it’s rarely contradicted even by reasonably articulate critics of wokist nonsense. But it should be.
I agree. I wonder how I’d address that silliness in a conversation . . .
Gee that was fast . . .
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/biden-seeks-counter-state-actions-sees-anti-lgbtq-85412478
I don’t understand any of this stuff. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as homosexual until well in high school when two college buddies of my mother visited. Our father told us about them prior to dinner. My brother couldn’t eat with us. They were wildly effeminate. That was it I didn’t know another one and one I worked with I only learned about after he died, then I had a friend who died for the same reason, he was bisexual which we didn’t know. What’s my point. They are a minority and not important, if we eliminate representative government, which is the objective of some at the top, before it all collapses into something familiar to history, we’ll stop all this sillyness and while some folks at top will be gay, they won’t push it, nor racial diversity and all the other in-stuff that is being used to divide and weaken the republic. It’ll look like a regular dictatorship as it tightens at the top and as the bottom dies, then it’ll settle down into what the world experienced for the most of its history.
Just like Leftist, for whom their primary identification is leftist first, and everything else later, homosexuals’ identity is homosexual first, and everything else later, including occupation, religion, etc. At my last job, we were not supposed to display any political signs at our desk, but the homosexual buyer had a sign with the yellow “equal” sign on the blue background that means “marriage equality”, and no one challenged him on it. I tried not to go by his desk if possible.
Yes. The Portland area once had a chain of men’s stores called “The Gay Blade.” When the homosexual lobby stole that term “gay,” the stores were forced to change their longstanding name.
You should see what’s going on in Ireland at the moment. A call-in radio show on the national broadcaster conducted a debate in the past week about the tensions between transgenderism and feminism. I only heard a little of it myself, but I have read plenty. It was relatively tame and was moderated by a host who generally buys into the progressive agenda.
But there has been a complete meltdown by the usual suspects, who, as you say, are saying exactly that their existence is being denied. “Dublin Pride”, an umbrella group for LGBTetc has withdrawn from its formal alliance with the broadcaster (as if such a thing was appropriate in the first instance). “Irish Pride” is already a brand of sliced bread, thank God. The broadcaster has been summoned to explain itself to a Parliamentary committee. It has already made a limited apology. Twitter and Co are on fire, although most media articles on the subject have closed their comments sections.
The net effect does seem to be that the majority of the public, who were unaware of the influence that these people have on public policy, have been awakened and are unimpressed by the hysteria.
The homosexual activists have succeeded in turning me into a homosexual hater who thinks homosexuals and other sexual deviants should be shoved back into the closet and denied most claimed “rights.”
The homosexual activists (and their affiliated sexual deviants) have become explicit as they work on turning as many children as possible into sexual deviants that certainly they recognize that deviant sexual proclivities are not primarily biologically determined. As they work to destroy civilized society, I have less and less desire to show them any tolerance or compassion. Many people predicted where we are was always the objective of the advocates of sexual deviancy, but those accurate predictions were called unfair fear mongering. Yet here we are with advocates of sexual deviancy seeking to undermine society at every corner.
I didn’t get to my current position through immersing myself in anti-homosexual rhetoric. I got here by watching and listening to the activities of the advocates of homosexuality and other sexual deviancies.
I am bothered that I have allowed others to turn me into a hater, but I don’t have the strength to figure out how to react otherwise when the foundations of civilization are being undermined.
Chris, the desire to be in a group doesn’t seem odd to me.
Most people appear to like being part of groups. Like-minded people often like to group together. This is just observation. Sports fans hang around sports fans, drinkers hang around drinkers, bookish people hang around bookish people (OK, maybe a bit less often than sports fans). Perverts hang around perverts, weirdos and freaks hang around weirdos and freaks.
There are many benefits to being in a group. There’s a sense of belonging. It’s nice to have friends, it seems, even if the friends are pretty bad (think junkies or perverts). If you have the sense that you’re doing something wrong, it seems easier to ignore this if other people are doing the same thing.
He also didn’t say, “Remember me? I’m the guy who had that one hit twenty-something years ago. I thought it was gonna last forever, but…”
Remember Menudo?
Yes, unfortunately.
Who forced them to do this? Sounds like yet another example of woke over-reach.
The general public might make the assumption that the name of the establishment expresses an interest in a preferred clientele. Gays buy a lot of clothes, but probably not enough to make up for the lost business.
There was also that scandalous “Sanford and Son” episode:
People insinuate themselves into groups for security, Jerry. This is not the same as having friends, though the effect can be similar. A group of friends is made up of individuals, relationships may differ among them. A gang, organization, etc. works to a purpose and you only put yourself among them because you find a benefit there.
With the groups in question it may be that an individual is unable to reach level of self-acceptance for whatever reason and then counts on an external source to soothe on the one hand and, perhaps (perhaps often), project his or her anger on the other. It is unhealthy reliance, first, on the group, and second, on the larger world which the group insists must accept it.
My problem with many groups that bear and promote downtrodden labels is they insist on no accountability for their members. In fact, criticism is hate. Even for some here, criticism sends them into fight-or-flight mode, and the answer to the criticism sometimes reveals a reliance on others or an association.
Being a part of a group is what you make it, Jerry. Many seem to make demands both of and through the group.