Ellen DeGeneres Doesn't Speak for the LGBT Community

Perhaps I am more sensitive because I have had anti-gay expletives directed at me and been fired for being gay.  Or perhaps I reject absolution for insincere apologies/contrition - something the Catholic Church granted to countless predator priests.  The bottom line is, I do not believe Kevin Hart should be forgiven for his past anti-gay statements and I believe the only thing he is sorry about is that he lost the gig hosting the Oscars in February.  Thus, Ellen DeGeneres doesn't speak for me or, I suspect many others in the LGBT community when she granted Hart absolution.  Indeed, the blow back DeGeneres is receiving is well deserved.  No one anointed her to speak for the rest of us and, if Hart is invited back to host the Oscars, I may well choose to NOT watch the show. A piece in the Washington Post properly takes DeGeneres to task.  Here are excerpts:

Who died and made Ellen DeGeneres the gay pope?

In December, comedian Kevin Hart’s appointment to host the 2019 Academy Awards drew renewed attention to his hateful and damaging comments about gay people. The academy asked Hart to apologize: he refused and bowed out just days after the initial announcement. Many LGBTQ people cheered the withdrawal as the right move.

But now, in an interview that aired Friday on her daytime talk show, DeGeneres has absolved Hart of his ugly history. DeGeneres, who is gay, shared during the interview that she’d even interceded to ask the Oscars organizers to reconsider Hart as host.

Et tu, Ellen? As strange as this spectacle may seem, it’s actually in keeping with DeGeneres’s brand of nice. It’s a value she has sought to spread through the world, long signing off her show by telling her audience, “Be kind to one another.” Kindness means giving second chances, and giving second chances apparently means allowing Hart, who in 2011 tweeted that if his son played with a dollhouse he would “break it over his head & say n my voice ‘stop that’s gay,’ ” to host the most prestigious event in American cinema — one that’s also known as the Gay Super Bowl for its celebration of fashion and drama. On the set of DeGeneres’s show, anyone who thinks otherwise is simply a hater.

But that loud Internet crowd, which appears much larger than DeGeneres has allowed for, has it right. Niceness doesn’t require people to be pushovers. And kindness doesn’t mean forgiving people who’ve done bad things without being sure they understand what happened and are committed to making things right. DeGeneres’s unilateral dispensation to Hart on behalf of the LGBTQ community (and her kneecapping of Hart’s critics) truncates that process. That’s bad for all the LGBT people she claims to represent. And it’s bad for Hart, who gets to skip over the part of the process where he becomes a better, more empathetic person.

Hart made a halfhearted apology when he announced he was stepping down as host. But he hasn’t made any clear amends to LGBTQ people, and he certainly doesn’t seem to have atoned for his words. How can he, so long as he views the criticism of his past words as “slander on my name”?

More important, even if Hart had more fully repented, his sins are not DeGeneres’s to forgive.

Hart’s remarks were directed to queer people of color, who are generally much more vulnerable than their white counterparts. A 2017 poll from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Harvard showed that LGBTQ people of color are twice as likely to have experienced discrimination in hiring and police interactions as white LGBTQ people, and that they are six times as likely to not call the police in a threatening situation so as to avoid reprisal.

Really, no single person is qualified to offer the forgiveness of all of queer America. But a white cisgender woman who is widely beloved and obscenely wealthy to boot is particularly ill-suited to try to muster such papal authority. For DeGeneres to think herself licensed to dispense this pass to Hart suggests that the only real indulgence here is her own.

Pope Francis Can Begin By Apologizing For His Own Hateful Words

I have been highly critical of Pope Francis' statement that the Catholic Church needs to apologize to gays for they way the Church has mistreated them (he also named other groups mistreated by the foul old men in dresses at the Vatican).  I will take another swing at the issue in my July column in VEER Magazine.  Over at Huffington Post, Michelangelo Signorile has a great column that takes Francis to task for not just for the Church's past demonetization of - and at times out right murder of  - gays but also for his own misdeeds while Cardinal Bergoglio in Argentina.  I will not be holding my breath for a real, heartfelt apology  from Pope Francis.  Here are highlights from Michelangelo's column: 

Last week the media gave a lot of attention to Pope Francis agreeing that the Catholic Church owed an apology to gays. But his statement, while positive on its face, deflected from horrendous remarks Francis himself made in the past and which he can and should personally apologize for right now. Before diving into that, however, let’s review Francis’s journey on the issue of homosexuality since he became pope in 2013.

Francis stayed silent as country after country in Europe and the Americas legalized marriage for gays and lesbians over the past few years, in sharp contrast to his predecessor, Pope Benedict, who railed against Spain when it was out front on marriage equality in 2005; he even traveled there to speak out against it. And then came Francis’s “Who am I to judge?”response to a question about a gay priest, and several other comments that indicated his emphasis would be different.

Like an artful politician, however, Francis has seemed to play to his audiences. Six months into his papacy he told a fellow Jesuit interviewer for a Jesuit journal that he is not a “right-winger” and criticized those in the church who had become “obsessed” with gay marriage and abortion. But then in January of last year it was Francis who seemed obsessed with the issue while speaking to an audience in the Philippines, a traditional Catholic country, suggesting that gay marriage threatens families.

And now these new comments from the pope last week have reverberated after he was asked about a German cardinal’s opinion that, in light of the Orlando mass shooting at the Pulse LGBT nightclub in Orlando, the church should apologize to gays.

Francis agreed that the church owed an apology to gays, and it drew headlines around the world. He repeated his “who are we to judge?” line, though was was careful to add in that the church should apologize to a lot of groups, which mitigated his statement somewhat . . . . Nonetheless, it was a major statement — enough to drive anti-LGBT forces into a frenzy. Bill Donohue of the Catholic League emphatically said “No!” when asked if he agreed with his pope that gays deserved an apology.

LGBT Catholic groups, however, were right to criticize the pope for saying nothing of church doctrine that condemns homosexuality as “intrinsically disordered” — and pointed to the fact that young people, including LGBT people, are taught this from a young age and that teachers in Catholic schools are fired if found to be gay. Francis referred to the catechism to back his stance that gays shouldn’t be discriminated against, yet it is that same catechism that condemns homosexuality — and it needs to be re-written.

That’s an immense undertaking that he likely doesn’t have the will for — if it could even be done at all in the current climate at the Vatican.  One thing, however, that the pope could easily do is apologize for his own harsh and, yes, violence-inciting words about gays when he was Cardinal Bergoglio in Argentina in 2010.

As the Argentine government was moving to legalize marriage for gays and lesbians, Bergoglio was quietly lobbying for civil unions instead, having spoken to at least one gay activist, realizing that the rights gays were deprived of were real and knowing that he and the church couldn’t support marriage.

When that didn’t work, and the government made it clear it was moving forward on marriage, Bergoglio did what the Vatican expected of him and which, like a politician, he knew he likely had to do if he were ever to have a shot at becoming pope in Benedict’s Vatican: He issued an ugly, earth-scorching attack against gays, equating gay marriage and adoption by gay couples with the work of the Devil, and declared that gay marriage was a “destructive attack on God’s plan.”

Those kinds of words are the kind that killers of gay people take solace in. Those are the words that empower those who bash gays, and those who fire gays from their jobs. And those are the kinds of words that Francis clearly is saying the church must apologize for. If it’s not those words, after all, then what exactly is Francis referring to?

So, Francis didn’t have to say the “church” should apologize, and thus distance himself from an institution that, though he leads it, he likely rightly sees as difficult to change. All he had to do was say, “I apologize” for the harsh words that “I’ve made,” in the name of the church by equating gay people with evil — words that inspire those who would do harm to LGBT people.

Rather than wait for “the church” to make the apology for which he called — which could take eons — he could still make that personal apology himself right now.