From his speech last night at Cooper Union
-
What’s the debate?
-
I’m not living in pig shit.
-
Oh, is the debate about living in pig shit or not?
It’s about the gay community condeming ourselves to the preverbial gas chambers of the Bush administration…
Another outvoted liberal going into hysterics.
Hey, in case no one noticed, there were not massive black-church burnings in the South following Bush’s 2000 victory, as hysterical black activists expected.
No rights that gays enjoyed in 2000 have been removed between then and 2004, and the same is likely to be true from now through 2008. Is it also true that no new rights will be recognized/added? Sure. But it’s hardly a “march to the guillotine.”
Or to address the OP more clearly: no, he’s not right.
Well, I’d respond to that in this manner…
While I think there was a clear rejection of the gay cohort in the recent election results I think a large part of that was the use of the gay marriage amendment as a wedge issue. Whether the current republican leadership give a rat’s ass about gay rights is irrelevant. I think they DO give a rat’s ass about that issue’s ability to split the electorate and guarantee their power. That’s solid electioneering.
As for the ‘pigshit’ thing…
For the millionth time. Unlike the Jews in Hitler’s Germany gay folks have a whole slew of friendly western-style democracies that they can choose from. I’m not saying ‘be straight or get out’…far from it. Stay and make the fight if you feel you have the strength. But if you don’t you can get out. There will be no kystallnacht against the gay communities in the United States.
Ok, I read it. That guy’s crazy.
I had *no * idea who Larry Kramer was so I’ve never looked to him for leadership. I did a search and found that he founded ACT-UP which, IMHO, would explain the obnoxious hyperbole in his rantings in the OP’s link.
The speech he gave was scattershot at best. He’s talking about Bush here, gay there, AIDS here, drug use there. He had a lot of talking points that he threw in a pot and tried to present as a whole.
He also tries to segregate LGBT population from the rest of society by saying things like:
He invokes Godwin’s Law:
But (and perhaps precisely because there’s no real physical danger) it just provides the most exquisite frisson to imagine oneself as a beleaguered cabaret performer who didn’t get out of Weimar in time and is now on the run from the SS! Sorry, I can’t imagine any other reason than some twisted Tom-of-Finland fascination with jackboots that would lead a rational person to compare his current “plight,” wherein his preferred candidate lost an election in a Western Democracy having a high standard of living and personal safety and virtually no statistical risk of physical persecution, let alone actual death, to “gas chambers,” and I’d imagine others might be offended too.
cmkeller was right, but only part right, in asserting that homosexuals lost no net rights in 2000-2004. They actually gained huge new rights, and any modest negative reaction by the GOP or anyone else was merely a possibly-quixotic protest against developments such as Lawrence.
If being handed recognition of a “constitutional right to sodomy,” something that was unimaginable as recently as the 1980s, is “pigshit,” I hope I and mine get some pigshit results in the next four years too. If the next four years of Bush follow the trend of developments of the first first four years, the Supreme Court will have to find that “gay marriage” is mandatory and every television network will feature approximately 27 hours a day of shows starring “outrageous” “gay diva” types, if the yield curves continue on their current trend.
I’d say this is a prime example of someone who revels in his own victimhood. I have a friend like that-- we’ve nicknamed him “Vic”. There truely are people who believe that being a victim is the modern day, secular equivalent of being a saint. And when real victimhood is unavailable, there’s always the trumped-up kind.
John, while I certainly don’t think Kramer is a saint, it’s very easy to cast stones at someone who honestly called the government’s bluff 24 years ago, when there were 41 known cases. There really are 70 million now, with 22 million dead.
It is hard for me to see what that has to do with Bush and pigshit and gas chambers.
So Kramer bitched about AIDS. That’s not really “calling the government’s bluff.” Up until then, no one, including the government, as far as I can tell, thought that the government could or should guarantee a cure for all diseases, whether spontaneously arising, spread through voluntary actions of the sufferers, or both. To me, Kramer’s expectation that the government somehow magically foresee, and cure, a particular disease is at best hysterical and presumptuous in view of the fact that few if any governments ever, anywhere, have been able to tell their populaces that they know and can protect against every disease to which nature, or their behavior, may expose them.
In this respect only – his solipsistic hysterical tendencies – I think Kramer’s prior conduct is relevant to his current hysterics, and to talk of gas chambers. Otherwise, I’m not sure what ACT-UP’s antics of 20 years ago have to do with the hand-wringing over homosexual concentration camps and pig shit. But hey, nor was I a drama major.
Kramer’s pretty much a professional grouch now. I don’t really know any gay people who still look up to him for leadership. While I do appreciate what he did back when the AIDS epidemic was looming, even then he sabotaged his own goals by being incredibly abrasive, nasty, mean and condescending to EVERYONE.
It really doesn’t surprise me to hear him talk like this. Hell, I was talking like this about ten minutes after 2am on Nov 3. Then I got over it. Larry doesn’t get over things…at least not while chewing on them loudly in public can keep the cameras and spotlights on him.