The Other McCain

My brother Kirby called this afternoon and began the conversation by saying, “You know if that kid in Florida kills himself . . .”

Yeah, they’ll blame me.

Volunteer Official Scapegoat™ of the Hate Olympics.

Someone has to be the conservative who notices things you’re not supposed to notice and says things you’re not supposed to say.

The chief qualifications for this gig are (a) scorn for popularity and (b) disregard for the short-term goals of the Republican Party. If your goal is to become the Popular Person Embraced by the Official GOP, you can never speak the kind of truth that makes people uncomfortable, you can never risk anything in a fight, and you are ultimately doomed to a defensive strategy of retreat.

Glenn Beck said on his Monday show that anti-gay people “have no place in this country.” . . .
“Anybody within the sound of my voice that hates a gay person because they’re gay, you have no place calling yourself a fan of mine,” Beck said. “You have no place in this country.”
Beck has spoken out in support of gay marriage several times before. Earlier in January, he voiced his opposition against Russia’s anti-gay laws and announced that he would stand by the LGBT advocacy group GLAAD in their fight against “hetero-fascism.”
“You are not a fan of mine — you have no friendship here — if you hate people because they’re gay,” Beck also added. “You have no place claiming that you’re a fan of this show. . . . If that’s who you are, I don’t want to have anything to do with you.”

Of course, the problem with Beck’s rhetoric here is that it conflates political opposition to a certain policy agenda (or religious objections to homosexual behavior) with “hate,” which is an assertion so absurd that I hesitate to dignify it with a response.

Look, my religious beliefs condemn premarital sex and re-marriage after divorce. Do I “hate” people who don’t live up to those biblical standards of behavior? No one has ever accused me of such a hate, because there is no recognized Promiscuity Lobby trying to mobilize an identity politics constituency to vote Democrat by labeling Republicans a hate group on such a basis. Once you get past the irrational bullying tactics of the Left and look at the actual data, you recognize that the gay agenda represents an effort to re-order social norms on behalf of an extremely small (but quite vocal and well-funded) minority:

The Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, a gay and lesbian think tank, released a study in April 2011 estimating based on its research that just 1.7 percent of Americans between 18 and 44 identify as gay or lesbian, while another 1.8 percent — predominantly women — identify as bisexual. Far from underestimating the ranks of gay people because of homophobia, these figures included a substantial number of people who remained deeply closeted, such as a quarter of the bisexuals. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey of women between 22 and 44 that questioned more than 13,500 respondents between 2006 and 2008 found very similar numbers: Only 1 percent of the women identified themselves as gay, while 4 percent identified as bisexual.

So the LGBT coalition encompasses 3.5 percent of the population, max, to whom the other 96.5 percent are expected to kowtow?

Never has such a large majority dog been so easily wagged by such a small minority tail, led by radicals who habitually impugn all opposition in the most vituperative language imaginable. Dana Pico at First Street Journal notes the implicit insistence “that homosexual relationships are just as good, just as wholesome, just as normal, as heterosexual ones,” i.e., compulsory approval. As I explained more than five years ago (“Gay Rights, Gay Rage,” The American Spectator, Nov.  17, 2008), those who speak of homosexuality in the language of “rights” are not about liberty, but rather about equality in the most radical sense and, as Richard Weaver famously warned, Ideas Have Consequences.

This is how we reach the point at which people believe they have the “right” to make you bake them a lesbian wedding cake. This is how we reach the point where no one is supposed to object to teenage boys getting paid for a six-way “bareback orgy” on video.

Do you think this kind of stuff is worth discussing? “You have no place in this country.” Ace says Glenn Beck is now “all about attempting to get TimeWarner and ComCast to pick up his cable channel.”

Yeah, because MSNBC needs more competition.