Rad Geek People's Daily

A question has been rolling around in my mind for the past day or so. Why in the hell does anyone take Ann Coulter seriously? For a while I had hoped that Rightists generally recognized that she is absolutely bonkers, but kept her around for the PR purpose of having a token female to point to when criticized for their overwhelmingly rich, white, and male (Ann Coulter is only two of the three) cadre of talking heads. However, I have seen one too many online comment raving to preach on after her sociopathic gibberish and I simply must accept that some people other than Ann Coulter actually believe this shit.

Perhaps I should not be too surprised; after all, Ann’s writings are currently carried by FrontPage Magazine, the house organ of the equally insane David Horowitz. But still…

A couple of months ago, National Front candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen managed to make it into the runoff for France’s Presidential race before he was crushed by a popular front vote for the incumbent President Jacques Chirac. 19.5% voted for Chirac and 17.5% for Le Pen in the first round; in the runoff, Le Pen received the same 17.5% and the 2/3 of voters who had voted for neither all swung behind Chirac. Despite Le Pen’s crushing defeat and the failure of the National Front to gain any parliamentary seats in the June elections, the fact that Le Pen pulled such a large minority of French voters to his side troubled many Leftists.

Three days before his imminent defeat, Ms. Coulter set out on a quixotic mission to defend his candidacy and ruminate on why the cabal of liberals was directing such blind rage against him. However, somehow, in the process of her delirious, racist ravings (In addition to mutilating girls and burning synagogues, another popular Muslim pastime in France is to steal cars, set them on fire and push them off cliffs), she somehow neglected to mention–either because she doesn’t know or doesn’t care–the fact that Jean-Marie Le Pen is an unreconstructed fascist, who founded his National Front party with Vichy collaborators. In her musings on the murky issue of why Le Pen is described as an anti-Semite, his notorious description of the Holocaust as a mere detail in the history of World War II also slips her mind.

But enough on past foibles. Her most recent column, entitled Liberalism and Terrorism, was brought to my attention by Tom Tomorrow, who noted that Coulter attacked him for not being a real American… because of his satirical cartoon against Right-wing rhetoric that dissenters are not real Americans (Irony’s obituary will be featured in today’s New York Times).

Not that that is all that is ludicrous about her column, of course:

• No matter what defeatist tack liberals take, real Americans are behind our troops 100 percent, behind John Ashcroft 100 percent, behind locking up suspected terrorists 100 percent, behind surveillance of Arabs 100 percent. (Apparently Arab-Americans who object to being singled out for legal harassment and intimidation aren’t real Americans; neither is anyone who is the least bit queasy about mounting assaults on basic Constitutional guarantees. Anyone who fights for the full protection of constitutional due process against arbitrary seizure of power and tyranny by the Executive, is clearly a terrorist-lover who hates our freedom.)

• These people simply do not have an implacable desire to kill those who cheered the slaughter of thousands of American citizens. (Let us simply meditate in silence on Ann Coulter’s apparent endorsement of having an implacable desire to murder people on the basis of cheering an evil event–that is to say, slaughtering people for having bad thoughts.)

Coulter goes on to cite George Orwell in an attempt to support massive centralization of power in the hands of the Executive branch, disregard for civil liberties, perpetual war against vaguely-defined enemies, and extensive State surveillance.

I mean, seriously.

After a week relaxing and visiting family in Texas, I have returned. Apologies for the departure without notice; I simply put it off until I was too busy packing to come around and put the post up.

We need your help to raise a voice for women’s reproductive rights!

Vote.com recently put a vote online on whether Congress should pass a federal ban on partial-birth abortion, a key component of the Right’s strategy to chip away at and destroy women’s reproductive freedom and doctor’s ability to provide abortions. Similar bills at the state level have already been struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court (you can read more here on phoney "partial-birth abortion" bans).

The vote is online at Vote.com. To defend reproductive choice, vote NO! Such medical decisions should be left in the hands of women.

Right-wingers typically dominate the issues at Vote.com, and the results go directly to the President and Congress. We need to mobilize as many people as we can to tell Congress NOT to pass another bad partial-birth abortion bill. Please vote today, and forward this alert to everyone you know who cares about protecting reproductive choice!

Today is the 33^rd anniversary of the Stonewall uprising (well, perhaps: some date Stonewall on June 28, since much of what occurred was after midnight) in New York City, the foundational event of the modern gay liberation movement. But it seems to have slipped many gay rights organizations’ minds.

Stonewall marked the first spectacular uprising of a radical, agitating gay movement which would no longer settle for the daily denigration and terrorism inflicted against LGBT people, and would not accept compromise, appeasement, or a ghettoized underground gay community as the solution.

Although the Stonewall Inn remains a powerful marker to gay liberation activists outside of the US, many in America have forgotten it, or wish we would. Today, there is a feel-good liberal gay rights movement which (sometimes) pays lip service to Stonewall, but rarely remembers the power of that moment. And there is a gay Right movement which loathes Stoneall and everything it stands for. They both work, with only slightly different priorities, for appeasement, tolerance, and assimilation into the mainstream of American culture. But at Stonewall they were not pleading for justice in return for assimilation. Butch dykes, fairies, drag queens, street kids, and every other spectre haunting homophobic American culture stormed through the streets, fighting back against the police who had victimized them for so long. Stonewall’s lasting legacy rests in groups such as the Gay Liberation Front, Radicalesbians, ACT-UP, and others, which confronted our culture with an uncompromising demand for justice, an end to oppression rather than an end to difference. This is what has marked the past three decades with unparalleled success, compared to the relative stagnation of the era of reformist groups such as the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis and ghettoized underground bars.

The feel-good liberals and the conservatives play into each other’s hands to write the radicals out of history. I looked for a good story on the anniversary, and found nothing at all on:

1. The Advocate magazine and news updates
2. Out
3. Gay.com News
4. Human Rights Campaign
5. PFLAG

But in spite of the blackout, the radicals have been here all along. They were instrumental to the triumphs of the past thirty years, as gay liberation has made stellar progress on every front. They were here to suffer the horrors, with the Reagan backlash, the AIDS holocaust, and the rise in anti-gay murders. And all significant progress toward gay liberation depends on the ability of radical views and solutions to remain within the LGBT community and LGBT activism.

I hope that everyone will take some time today to remember and thank those who have gone before us in the struggle for justice. Happy anniversary, everyone.

As of this morning I will be on the road to visit the family in Texas (partially because I haven’t seen them in ages, partially as a maneuver to get the car back in time to pick up a guest from Atlanta), so GT and The Daily Linkroll may be sporadic for a little while. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

In the meantime, have a ball reading T. Phoebe Reilly’s review and critique of Ghost World from Bitch. I recently saw the film and enjoyed it a great deal; the review does a pretty good job of summing up both what I liked and what worried me throughout.