Queen of Hate, Maggie Gallagher Admits Marriage Battle is Lost

If one wants to the face of someone who has enriched themselves disseminating hate, look no farther than former head of the National Organization for Marriage ("NOM") - here in Virginia, our mini queen of hate is Victoria Cobb - who drew nice six figure incomes demonizing gays and spreading religious based hatred.  Now, in a recent column, Gallagher laments that the battle against gay marriage is all but lost.  She then, of course, shifts into would be Christian victim role whining that Bible believing Christians will be facing likely persecution for their beliefs.  Here are highlights from Gallagher's lament:

What I am advocating doing is three very big, and very hard things: a) accepting where we are and b) learning from what we did not succeed in so that we can get to c) how do we build anew?

Right now most people who believe in the classic understanding of marriage are in shock, they are awed by the powers now shutting down the debate and by our ineffectualness at responding to these developments.

The version of America we were born into is no more. For the first time in American history being a faithful Christian (or Jew or Muslim) now calls into question in the public square in a new way one’s good citizenship.

The rapid collapse of opposition to gay marriage we are witnessing did not just happen, and it was not inevitable. But it is.

The question now on the table is: will orthodox Christianity (and other traditional faiths), be stigmatized and marginalized as the equivalent of racism in the American public square?  Will Biblical morality be wiped out as an acceptable public position in America?
Or will we regroup, rebuild as a subculture, and survive to become the possibility of a new foundation in the future?

Hiding or pretending is not going to help us, now.  We have to face the truth. 

[Charles] Cooper [who defended Proposition 8] said two things that upset many people on our side: “My views evolve on issues of this kind the same way as other people’s do, and how I view this down the road may not be the way I view it now, or how I viewed it ten years ago,” he said to Jo Becker some months ago.  And when the book became public and the news of his stepdaughter’s wedding came out he told AP:  ““My daughter Ashley’s path in life has led her to happiness with a lovely young woman named Casey, and our family and Casey’s family are looking forward to celebrating their marriage in just a few weeks.”

And here is the thing I take away, and what I want you to take away, from the Charles Cooper story: . . . . There is no line we can draw that pushes gay people “outside” and leaves us free “inside” to be angry, foot-stomping, and morally “pure.”

Next, Brendan Eich and Mozilla. Here we face the fist within the velvet glove—one of the few public instances of what is happening all over America. 

We live in an America in which standing up for Biblical morality (or its common sense moral analog) puts your employment in jeopardy.  How will we respond to the fear this inspires?  Will we recognize we are a subculture now facing a dominant culture and build subculture strategies? 

[T]the first struggle we now face is internal and spiritual:  Will we accept the newly dominant culture’s view of our views—of ourselves—as hateful and bigoted and stand down?   Or will we, first of all in our heart and minds, refuse to accept this external view of ourselves.  Will we stigmatize ourselves or will we force the powerful to do that to us?

Christian conservatives have been doing politics stupidly and on the cheap.   If we keep doing politics this way we will soon not have to do politics at all.   To win a space for us at the American table, we are going to need to invest large amounts of money in new and directly political institution—organizations capable of unelecting those who would shut us out, and those capable of rewarding the courage of those who agree with us.

I have little doubt that Maggie will be at the tough of money that she is saying that the Christofascists need to spend.  She enjoys living the good life without having to have a real, socially productive job.   Like most of the professional Christian crowd, she's little more than a parasite living off of the ignorant and uneducated.

Why the "Freedom to Dissent" Pledge Is Wrong and Justifies Anti-Gay Activism

In the wake of the Brendan Eich debacle at Mozilla a number of gay conservatives, including Andrew Sullivan, and the in my view always slimy Ken Mehlman who assisted George W. Bush's anti-gay marriage campaign, have signed a pledge that protests against "intolerance" based on individuals' political and/or social views.  These individuals would have one believe that Eich was a martyr for free speech.   The problem is that if taken to its logical conclusion, then there should be no accountability for those who support racists views, antisemitism, Neo-Nazi beliefs and a host of other forms of bigotry.  Yes, individuals are free to hold whatever views that the want, but that does not mean that the rest of us have to overlook their nastiness.  A piece in Think Progress expands on the wrongheadedness of the so-called pledge.  Here are excerpts:

Since Brendan Eich resigned as CEO of Mozilla because of his donation to the Proposition 8 campaign, many have continued to debate whether public figures should be held accountable for their anti-gay activism. A new effort under the banner of “Freedom to Marry, Freedom to Dissent,” which seems to be driven by pro-LGBT conservatives, argues that “disagreement should not be punished” because “disagreement is not, itself, harm or hate.”

The public statement compares Eich to Frank Kameny, an early gay rights activist who lost his job because of his sexual orientation, suggesting that those who celebrate Eich’s departure are engaging in the same kind of discrimination. “Like [Kameny],” the statement concludes, “we place our confidence in persuasion, not punishment.”

This “Freedom to Dissent” pledge essentially justifies anti-gay advocacy. Ilya Somin, writing for The Volokh Conspiracy at the Washington Post, ironically illuminates this reality while explaining why he felt he couldn’t sign it:

I felt unable to sign the petition when asked, because there are some parts that might be construed as claiming that it is never appropriate to fire people for their political views. For example, at one point the statement asserts that “the consequence of holding a wrong opinion should not be the loss of a job.” I think this is true in the vast majority of cases, but not always. For example, few would object if Eich had been fired for donating money to the KKK or a neo-Nazi organization – even if he had otherwise performed his duties well, and had never mistreated any of Mozilla’s black or Jewish employees. Despite some deplorable PC excesses, overall the effort to stigmatize racism and Nazism has produced some beneficial results.

In other words, supporting racism and anti-Semitism would be deplorable, but supporting laws that discriminate against the gay community is forgivable. This double standard not only justifies homophobic thinking, but also placates the narrative put forth by opponents of equality that the LGBT movement consists of bullies.

For example, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly claimed on his show this week that gay rights activists are threatening to “harm,” “hurt,” and “intimidate” marriage equality opponents, though he couldn’t cite a specific example of such tactics. The American Family Association sent a fundraising email this week highlighting “7 common careers Christians may no longer hold in America,” listing photographers, bakers, florists, journalists, counselors, innkeepers, and teachers as examples of professionals that the LGBT movement attempts to “ostracize and humiliate” for running their businesses “according to the dictates of their faith and conscience” — i.e., for blatantly discriminating against LGBT people. These tactics claim that those who engage in discrimination are the victims, not the actual victims of the discrimination.

Those supporting this “Freedom to Dissent” pledge are promising to tolerate intolerance, which is exactly what opponents of LGBT equality are demanding. It’s unclear how defending those who wish for LGBT people to remain second-class citizens constitutes “the only truly secure path to equal rights,” as the pledge claims.

Conservative Hypocrisy Over Mozilla and the First Amendment

As often noted on this blog, conservatives - especially conservative Christians - are off the charts nowadays when it comes to hypocrisy and down right dishonesty.  They have victimized and demonized gays, blacks, unwed mothers and many others for decades but the moment their ability to persecute others is challenged, they go off the deep end and claim they they are the ones being persecuted.  They can dish out mistreatment but expect everyone else to worry about their own misplaced sensibilities - assuming one can call hatred and abuse of others to be sensibilities.  A piece in Slate looks at this amazing hypocrisy.  Here are highlights:

A repeated cry in conservative and libertarian circles over anti-gay Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich’s resignation is that the company is somehow trampling Eich’s free speech rights. Eich, as you’ve surely heard, donated $1,000 in 2008 to California’s Proposition 8 campaign, which successfully outlawed gay marriage in that state before getting shot down by the courts. It’s true that, because of this donation, Mozilla’s leaders and board members pressured Eich to resign. But it’s absurd and hypocritical to claim that this pressure constituted an infringement of Eich’s legal rights.

Let’s start with the obvious: It is literally impossible for Mozilla to violate Eich’s constitutional freedom of speech. At the risk of sounding pedantic, the First Amendment applies exclusively to state actors, like Congress or state legislatures, so a private corporation like Mozilla simply cannot infringe upon an employee’s free speech rights, even if it wanted to. There is no wiggle room around this point. It is a basic constitutional fact.

Mozilla’s decision to seek Eich’s resignation implicates the same First Amendment principles that famously allow the Boy Scouts to exclude gay troop leaders.

Oddly, however, I don’t see defenders of Eich also criticizing the Boy Scouts for excluding gay men because the organization disagrees with their conduct and beliefs. Nor do I even see conservatives taking Mozilla’s rights as a private corporation seriously—a predictable hypocrisy made especially obnoxious in light of last week’s widespread right-wing praise of the corporate plaintiff’s claim in Hobby Lobby. This is the conservative double standard in the realm of corporate rights: When the corporation supports a right-wing pet project—say, denying women reproductive care—conservatives pen encomia to the First Amendment’s corporate protections. But when a corporation dares to support a progressive cause like gay rights, conservatives cry foul at its alleged censorship of individual views.

The right wing’s backlash over Mozilla’s move only further proves that opportunism, rather than principled dissent, drives its frantic charge for full corporate personhood. Keep that in mind as the conservative outrage machine takes aim at Mozilla for daring to exclude a man whose values and conduct it finds unacceptable.