Radical lesbian activist @EllenPage decided that @TedCruz needed a lecture from her about equality and discrimination:
DES MOINES — Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and actress Ellen Page, of “Juno” fame, got into a testy and free-wheeling discussion Friday over gay rights here at the Iowa State Fair.
“I’m happy to answer your question but not to have a back-and-forth debate,” Cruz told Page, as she pressed him about discrimination against LGBT citizens, approaching him as he flipped pork chops over an open grill. . . .
“Imagine, hypothetically, you had a gay florist and imagine two evangelical Christians wanted to get married and the gay florist decided, ‘You know what, I disagree with your faith, I don’t want to provide flowers,’” Cruz said.
“I would say they should provide the flowers,” said Page, who earlier charged Cruz’s argument was the same used to justify segregation.
“And I would say the gay florist has every right to say, if I disagree with your faith and don’t want to participate…you know what? There are lots of other people to buy flowers from,” Cruz said. “…We are a country that respects pluralism and diversity and there is this liberal intolerance that says that anyone that dares follow a Biblical teaching of marriage, that is the union of one man and one woman must be persecuted, must be fined and must be driven out of business.” . . .
The senator went on to say that the much bigger challenge for gay people comes from the Middle East, where they are deeply persecuted by the Iranian government as well as the leadership of ISIS.
“On the left you hear complete silence” — “That’s not true!” Page interjected — “about Iran hanging homosexuals, and yet the Obama administration is sending over $100 billion to a regime that murders homosexuals,” Cruz continued. . . . .
“Why does the Obama administration not stand against this?” Cruz said.
“I don’t know, I’d love to talk to Obama about it,” Page replied
“Then we’re agreed!” Cruz shot back,
“No, no we’re not, don’t do that,” the actress said.
“We’re agreed! Ma’am, we’ve had a long discussion,” Cruz said.
“Yeah, I appreciate it, yeah,” she said sarcastically, and walked away.
Unsurprisingly, the liberal media tried to spin this attempted ambush as a courageous triumph for the celebrity lesbian, but Ian Tuttle at National Review isn’t buying the spin:
Alternative headline: “Actress from That One Movie about Roller Derby Confronts Princeton Debate Champ — Goes about as You Might Expect.”
Beyond highlighting Cruz’s expert-level debate skills, the exchange exposed Page’s “rejection of conscience protections altogether, and her endorsement of radical government intervention in all such matters,” as Tuttle says. Her arguments are based in the Equality Über Alles mentality that characterizes not only the militant gay movement, but also the radical feminist movement and the Left in general. Grant them what they demand today, and the radicals will return tomorrow with new demands, because “equality” can never be achieved, not even under the absolute tyranny of a totalitarian dictatorship. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek explained that “social justice” is a mirage — it seems to appear up ahead in the distance, but vanishes as soon as you approach it. There will always be someone claiming to be a victim of unfairness, so that to make “equality” (or “social justice” or, more vaguely, “progress”) your goal is to declare war on society itself, to inaugurate what Trotsky called “permanent revolution.”
No such thing as “equality” has ever existed in the history of human civilization, nor will any measure endorsed by the Left bring about “equality” in the future. The insistent demand for “equality” is nothing more than a pretext for political aggression that the Left uses to gain power by pandering to those who hope to gain some advantage from the enactment of radical egalitarian policies.
Despite her celebrity status, Ellen Page ultimately cannot escape the inevitable consequences of inequality, not even in gay-friendly Hollywood. Her high-profile “coming out” in 2014 has damaged her career prospects as an actress because, despite what anyone may imagine, the market demand for gay celebrities is much smaller than the available supply. Denounce the movie-going public as a bunch of bigoted haters, if you like, but the heterosexual majority (97.7% of Americans, according to federal research) expect their entertainment to be entertaining, and tiresome propaganda about The People’s Glorious Democratic Struggle for Gender Equality is not entertaining.
In reporting Ellen Page’s Iowa encounter with Ted Cruz, Politico noted, “Page attended as part of her new show with Vice, called ‘Gaycation,’ where she travels around the world and explores local attitudes about LGBT culture in each place.” What the heck? In August 2014, A&E Networks paid $250 million for a 20% share in Vice Media, rebranding A&E’s lame H2 channel as Vice TV, with Page’s gay travel show as one of the Genius Programming Ideas to justify this investment. Is this just more Hollywood politically correctness run amok? Not necessarily.
In a nation of more than 320 million people, of whom 240 million are 18 and older, if 2.3% of the adult population are LGBT, that’s a potential audience of nearly 6 million gay people in the U.S. alone. If you consider also Canada, Great Britain, Australia and other English-speaking countries in a worldwide digital media marketplace — where everything is online, just a click and a download away — you could easily envision a much larger LGBT audience, not to mention the even larger audience speaking other languages, watching with closed-caption translations.
The Global Gay-o-Sphere, as we might think of it, could be a valuable niche, and there are plenty of perverts in show business who would love nothing more than to get rich celebrating their own favorite fetishes. However, the mass market will always be heterosexual, and there is a limit to how much Happy Hollywood Homo programming the market will bear. Whether or not the LGBT Lobby has already “jumped the shark” Fonzie-style remains to be seen, but at some point people will get tired of seeing Gay! Gay! Gay! everywhere, and a backlash will become evident.
And what’s up with that Donald Trump thing, anyway?
Ellen Page’s militant protest act — “Hey, let’s attack this ignorant Republican bigot in Iowa!” — may please whatever number gay people watch her Vice TV show, but what about the many millions of Americans she implicitly insults? Make no mistake: Ellen Page hates Christians and despises heterosexuality, per se, with the same kind of vindictive sour-grapes resentment of normal people that inspired radical feminists like Charlotte Bunch, Adrienne Rich, Marilyn Frye and Sheila Jeffreys.
“The radical feminist argument is that men have forced women into heterosexuality in order to exploit them, and that lesbians, in rejecting male definitions of sexuality, are undermining the patriarchy. . . .
“Lesbianism is . . . fundamentally a challenge to patriarchal definitions of women.”
— Celia Kitzinger, The Social Construction of Lesbianism(1987)
“Feminist theorists . . . would probably all agree that the pressuring of women into heterosexuality serves the purposes of male supremacy. . . .
“Both heterosexuality as a political system and sexual violence as social control depend upon the construction of heterosexual desire. . . . A feminist analysis would suggest that the reconstruction of sexuality is necessary to undermine the sexual system of male supremacy.”
— Sheila Jeffreys, The Lesbian Heresy: A Feminist Perspective on the Lesbian Sexual Revolution (1993)
“Lesbianism was seen as central to feminism, both as a challenge to male supremacy . . . and as a redefining of the category of women, for women, and by women and outside the male hegemony. . . .
“The feminist point is that sex is central to women’s oppression. . . . Lesbianism within the feminist context was meant as a challenge to the exclusiveness and ‘naturalness’ of heterosexual desire as the only form of intimacy women are allowed.”
— Denise Thompson, Radical Feminism Today (2001)
“In the early 1970s both gay and feminist movements concurred in critiques of patriarchal, heterosexual institutions, such as the family, and there was a sense of common cause. . . . [A]ddressing the patriarchal structures that shaped family life, revealing women’s discontents with heterosexual relationships . . . feminists laid the foundation for a thoroughgoing critique of heterosexuality . . .”
— Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott, Theorizing Sexuality (2010)
Feminists have been trying to destroy the traditional family and eradicate Christian morality for more than 40 years. It is certainly no coincidence that in July 2013, more than six months before she announced her lesbianism, Ellen Page declared her allegiance to radical feminism in an interview with the Guardian:
“I don’t know why people are so reluctant to say they’re feminists. Maybe some women just don’t care. But how could it be any more obvious that we still live in a patriarchal world when feminism is a bad word? . . . Feminism always gets associated with being a radical movement — good. It should be. A lot of what the radical feminists [in the 1970s] were saying, I don’t disagree with it.”
Not content with her career as a Celebrity Lesbian, the radical feminist Ellen Page uses her influence to attack traditional morality and to ridicule Republicans like Ted Cruz for daring to argue that Christians have a right to live according to their religious beliefs.
Maybe the executives at A&E can justify their $250 million investment in this kind of hateful “entertainment” for the LGBT market, but nobody should be surprised if the dividends on that dubious investment in radicalism include an angry backlash from normal people who don’t enjoy being lectured about their alleged “homophobia.”
“The evidence shows conclusively that moral and religious views form the only basis for a belief that same-sex couples are different from opposite-sex couples.”
— U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker,
Aug. 5, 2010, San Francisco v. Schwarzenegger
“Believe me, sir, those who attempt to level never equalise. In all societies, consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost. The levellers therefore only change and pervert the natural order of things; they load the edifice of society, by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground.”
— Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
Do we want “equality” or do we want liberty? This is really the question, and Americans should not be compelled to apologize for our love of liberty. From the Reign of Terror in France to the “Killing Fields” of Cambodia, we have repeatedly seen atrocities radicals have justified in the name of “equality,” and the feminist movement has been forever stained with innocent blood by its advocacy of the abortion holocaust. Why is it that extraordinarily privileged people like Ellen Page believe the rest of us are ignorant bigots in need of their lectures? Do they suppose that we know nothing of history? Do they believe we are incapable of rational judgment? Do they imagine that we cannot justify our opposition to their radical agenda?
Or do they think that we simply lack courage to fight for truth?
