Dear Media Matters: Keep Your Dirty Hands Off the Gay Community – And Our Kids

by Charles Winecoff

In October (LGBT History Month), I wrote a piece in defense of Obama’s openly gay “Safe Schools Czar,” Kevin Jennings.  Mostly, I objected to the attacks on Jennings for his one-time, on-the-spot advice to a troubled, promiscuous teenage boy (urging him to practice safe sex – if the teen insisted on continuing to pick up men).  I also disagreed with the inflammatory notion that Jennings’s admiration for gay rights pioneer (and legendary moonbat) Harry Hay was an endorsement of pedophilia.

Hay was not a pedophile.  His big crime was being a hippie whose reason for waking up in the morning was to turn traditional sex roles upside down.  Hay even hated the macho “clone” look that swept though the gay community in the 1970s-80s, which he viewed as a dangerous capitulation to straight concepts of masculinity.  He relished playing devil’s advocate.

Unfortunately, Hay did lend his name in support of NAMBLA, mostly because the group had been rejected by mainstream gays, who were then still fighting to assimilate; in the counterculture universe of Harry Hay, that was a no-no.  But NAMBLA was just another gender-bending mind game for the aging “Radical Faerie” founder, not his driving passion.   Hay was no child molester; he was a kook – who enjoyed a committed, 40-year relationship with a man his own age that lasted until his death in 2002.

The point: gay people admire Harry Hay for his bravery in galvanizing gay men during the dark ages of the 1950s - not for his later, senile support of NAMBLA.

But back to Mr. Jennings.  His taste in books stinks.

As if the “Fistgate” scandal wasn’t bad enough - and doesn’t keep getting worse – a cesspool tsunami of evidence recently hit shore regarding Jennings’s Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) and its approved reading list of sexually explicit material – aimed at adolescents - including a guide to gay bars that was distributed at a 2005 GLSEN conference.

And they wonder why drinking and drugs are so prevalent in the gay community.  I hate to give up on a gay brother, but enough already.  Jennings is either totally incompetent at keeping schools safe - or, hat tip to Bill Clinton, it all depends what the meaning of “safe” is.

Meanwhile, Media Matters for America has dived headfirst into the sewer to do some quick and dirty damage control, defending every unsavory turd that’s floated to the surface – by smearing the whistle blowers (including BigGovernment.com) as “haters.”  The oldest trick in the “progressive” playbook.

So what exactly is Media Matters?

Well, Mediamatters.org describes itself as ”a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.”  Translation: a Democratically-funded propaganda machine that spews out innuendo to challenge common sense – such as its 2007 report disputing America’s conservative core and asserting that the vast majority of US citizens are actually “progressive across a wide range of controversial issues.”

While I commend MMA for giving the American people more credit for open-mindedness than they usually get, what MMA views as “progressive,” and what most average citizens (myself included) view as “progressive,” are very different things.

For example, one of MMA’s senior fellows is Eric Boehlert, a passionate supporter of Sami Al-Arian, the University of South Florida professor who, after 9/11, was discovered to be the North American leader of a little organization called Palestinian Islamic Jihad.  (That’s not a gay group.)  Boehlert claimed that Al-Arian was merely a victim of America’s omnipotent, rightwing media complex – CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC – you know, the telegenic fronts for the Aryan Nations and Focus On the Family.  (The KKK I could believe as that was a direct outgrowth of the Democrat Party – but I digress….)

Eric Boehlert

In traditional Stalinist fashion, MMA has systematically denounced, even ridiculed, anyone who objects to the inappropriate sex seminars sponsored by GLSEN – like Brian Camenker, the outspoken leader of MassResistance, the pro-family group based in Massachusetts (where “Fistgate” occurred).  Camenker has compared his struggle with the “progressive” agenda in schools to the battle against the Nazis in WW2.  His rhetoric may be overstated, but as MMA ”research” tries to paint Camenker as some kind of nut, the actual GLSEN reading list proves he is justified.

In 2007, Camenker complained that, ”A federal judge ruled that schools can show picture books to elementary school children about homosexual romance.”  If only the GLSEN-approved books stopped there.  Instead, these clunky tracts neglect love in favor of (far less universal) sexual practices that have nothing to do with the birds and the bees – and everything to do with (what is very often) compulsive adult behavior better suited to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders than to a seventh grade reader.

Kids are learning about the benefits of spitting versus swallowing when they should be reading Moby Dick.

The kinky, risky fetishes spilling out of these texts have been well-documented elsewhere.  But what’s equally disturbing is the deadening, inhuman language of race/gender politics that is being foisted on unsullied, impressionable minds.  Teenagers should be exposed to the colors, ideas, moral quandaries, literary innovations, and expansive worldviews of great authors - gay and straight, black and white, male and female - not the narrow, detached, theoretical manipulations of bitter Marxist hacks.

Case in point: GLSEN-recommended Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology, edited by Amy Sonnie, a book that was banned by the Texas Youth Commission in 2002.  The Cindy Sheehan of bookworms, Sonnie capitalized on her excommunication from Bush country with a blog called The Banned Librarian, on which she promotes (among other unoriginal causes) the “global intifada” against environmental and racial injustice, the whittling away of the Patriot Act – and the latest smears against Lou Dobbs (all supported, incidentally, with links to Media Matters “research”).

Revolutionary Voices is described on glsen.org as, “The first creative resource by and for queer and questioning youth of every color, class, religion, gender and ability… a collection of experiences, ideas, dreams, and fantasies expressed through prose, poetry, artwork, letters, diaries and performance pieces.”  Translation: anything goes – no standards required (they might hurt someone’s feelings).

On page 205, a lesbian contributor offers this lesson in cultural Marxist tolerance, otherwise known as victimhood:

In many ways I have privilege: I am white, middle-class, and attending college.  These factors grant me certain societally bestowed benefits.  In other ways, I am systemically oppressed: as a woman, as a youth, as a person with cerebral palsy, as a bisexual queer.  With these attributes, I fail to meet the optimal requirements for functioning in this white-supremacist, capitalist heteropatriarchy…  If you are not part of the system in the optimal way (i.e., as a straight, white, middle-class or upwardly mobile, Christian male), you pose a threat to that dominant system.

Excuse me? As a white gay man, even I know that male caucasians are no longer anywhere near top of the totem pole in guilt-ridden, Euro-phobic America.  Consequently, I thank God everyday for my homosexuality - the one weapon I have to survive in the PC jungle.  Be that as it may, what possible good could it do a teenager to read this kind of hateful, narrow-minded, postmodern evangelism?

More importantly, where is the art?  Where are the profound, humanistic thoughts that would – and should – qualify this as literature fit for school kids?  By that standard alone, Revolutionary Voices has no place in any classroom.  This is dead-end agitprop that won’t spark imagination or expand horizons – on the contrary, it’s designed to induce myopia, stir paranoia, and stunt the natural blooming of a child’s spirit.

But keeping people down – and in the dark – is the radical MO.   It makes mass control much easier.

Not surprisingly, Kevin Jennings’s own Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son: A Memoir of Growing Up, Coming Out, and Changing America’s Schools is also on the GLSEN reading list. “Creating safe schools for all youth is now a central part of the progressive agenda in American education—and Kevin Jennings is at the forefront of that fight,” declares Beacon Press.

Which raises the question: what has “progressive” come to mean?  Pigeon-holeing people before they’re even out of the gate, so that they never have a chance to feel part of the larger fabric of society?  Indoctrinating babies to distrust the very country of their birth?  That’s not progressive – it’s regressive.

Whether Jennings actually fired “Fistgate” instructor Margot Abels, whether or not he was aware of the graphic and inappropriate content of her seminar – or of the GLSEN-sanctioned smut – is almost irrelevant at this point (but not quite).  No matter what the excuses are, or how many there are, something is rotten in GLSEN’s politically-correct agenda.  “Tolerance” pushers have taken the intimacy out of sex and love, and turned the hardened, clinical dregs into a grim manifesto.

Schools do not need to be “queered.”  Gay kids are still kids (who deserve the same respect and protection as their peers).

The first inkling a boy might get that his brain is wired differently than the rest of the team would probably be a terrible crush on another boy – that’s life, folks - not an overwhelming desire to start playing with fecal matter and urine.  Once upon a time, being gay was about falling in love with another person who happened to be of the same sex.  That’s what inspired much of the great gay literature of Christopher Isherwood, James Baldwin, Isabelle Holland, E.M. Forster, Mary Renault, Tennessee Williams, Annie Proulx – even Gore Vidal.  Can we please get back to basics, and trust that our children, no matter how much testosterone they recieved in their first few months of life, can – and will – figure it out for themselves?

Ninety-nine percent of gay kids are the products of straight homes, so why force the issue with a claustrophobic “queer and questioning” curriculum?  Are straight boys and girls encouraged by the state to go to titty bars and hook up with horny MILFs or divorced dads?  Why this outrageous double standard when it comes to gay kids?

This is discrimination on a national level – all being done in the name of “progress.”  And Media Matters keeps rushing to its defense.  But then, Media Matters has no use for assimilated gay people.  Media Matters only cares about gay people as long as they can be used as a tool to hammer Fox News.

The truth is that conservatives do not hate gay people.  Haters hate gay people.  And there are many gay Independents, gay Libertarians, and even – gasp! – gay Republicans who want to raise their kids as decently as their straight neighbors (and who don’t think “fisting” is as important as math).  And just for the record, fisting isn’t even on the radar for most of us.

Media Matters is not helping the LGBT community.  In fact, quite the opposite.  By pointing fingers at concerned citizens and desperately trying to whitewash these biased educational affronts, MMFA is only reinforcing the perceived wedge between gays/lesbians - and their fellow Americans.  It’s confused “tolerance” with the exploitation of minors, tossed commonality under the bus in favor of “queerness” – and wrapped separatism in a pretty package called “diversity.”

Meanwhile, forty years of real progress by the gay community is being hijacked – and crippled - to fuel an ideological surge in a vicious culture-war-to-the-death.  Children are being used as pawns to tear down an imaginary enemy.  And hate, not love, is the doctrine.

Liberals like to say that war is not the answer.  Gays and lesbians need to realize just how much they stand to lose by not objecting to this brutal campaign.

Media Matters has no moral authority over us.  This is one battle they don’t have to win.


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Posted Dec 16th 2009 at 5:12 am in Culture, Featured Story, Media Criticism, Politics | 225 Comments