Equality or liberation? This weekend LGBT activists will stage a National Equality March and continue their demand to be equal to those heterosexuals so unimaginative as to continue to feudal wedding rites.
Of course, Martin's March on Washington comes to mind, an event much celebrated in our national discourse today but critiqued by leftists of the day and maligned by then-Nation of Islam spokesman, Malcolm X, as the "Farce on Washington" for its very careful stage management so not to upset the power structure. Further, Bayard Rustin was dis-invited and James Baldwin kept from view.
In seriousness, any people demanding rights of their government is not a laughing matter or a thing to be mocked. I do not. Neither should the love and partnership decisions between two people.
But anywhere else in the Dark Corners of the world such a march would be proof positive of a foreign government's worthiness of US sanctions and brow-beating. Secy of State Hillary Clinton assures us she will press the cause of human rights with her upcoming meeting with the Chinese: if only she's turn that mouthpiece of hers toward her homeland. It might have more effect since the Chinese are about ready to excavate us sorry selves and pair us with Lucy the missing link in a museum.
By our government continuing to brow-beat the dark world, which finds us fairly irrelevant, while neglecting rights issues at home puts them on the same pedestal as Bull Connor, chief law enforcer of the Old Ways. No problem here: just some outsiders stirring up trouble!
The LGBTQ community does suffer discrimination. Better than take their case to Washington, the seat of our national problems, let them take their march and a petition to the UN and World Court for a hearing. The World Court, after all, found against the US in what it ruled its terrorist attacks against Nicaragua.
But only oppressed people of those aforementioned Dark Corners do such insolent things because their own governments are unresponsive at best; lethal at worst, and for which these activists are given prizes by the former imperial powers. More jokes.
I write as a queer socialist, a former Queer Nation member, not a baroque suburban "Gay American" whose goal is to be just like the Joneses. They aren't normal, and equating myself to that wretched state would be a step down into mental illness. Demanding the Congress of Go-Slows and Do-Nothings to extend me an equal status to the Joneses is ... peculiar. But so are the poor who think that hard work and thriftiness will raise them into the 1% wealth owners.
So, why? Americans it has been said are a people without a history. This is rather cliche at this point. But the serious consequence of this is their firm belief that rights come from government - that every liberty they enjoy, from freedom from chattel slavery to the eight-hour work day to votes for women, end to child labor, have come from government waking up one frosty morning and melting the ice off the cherry blossoms with its warm heart.
LGBTQ liberation is social and economic liberation, and it demands simply universal health care, guaranteed housing, guaranteed income, publicly funded education, from kindergarten through college. Some LGBTQ activists speak about the many rights extended to married couples, and unimaginatively think the route to these rights is to extend an exclusive system to middle-class LGBTQ's. So not only do they want to emulate straight marriage but also the class stratification of capitalist society.
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