Gay activists know they’ve lost the moral high ground when even their supporters are laughing at their double standards and hypocrisy.
Last week, Slate published a video compilation titled “Flashback: When Democrats swore they would never back gay marriage.” It showed Democrats like Hilary Clinton and Harry Reid affirming that marriage is a covenant between one man and one woman. Alex Knepper, a writer for the Huffington Post and a gay man himself, posted the video on Facebook with the caption, “Look at these bigots.”
He was being sarcastic, of course. Liberals and Democrats are never considered bigots.
The most obvious example is the double standard applied to Rob Portman, the Republican Senator from my home state of Ohio. Three weeks ago, Portman publicly switched his position on gay marriage after his son came out.
“I’ve thought a great deal about this issue, and like millions of Americans in recent years, I’ve changed my mind on the question of marriage for same-sex couples,” Portman wrote in the Columbus Dispatch. “As we strive as a nation to form a more perfect union, I believe all of our sons and daughters ought to have the same opportunity to experience the joy and stability of marriage.”
You’d think gay activists would welcome a convert to their camp. But no—it was too little, too late. Portman’s op-ed attracted hundreds of hate-filled comments on the Dispatch’s site and elsewhere.
“The senator's inability to empathize with other humans until it directly impacted him makes me puke in my mouth a little,” one wrote.
“What took you so long? Weren't gay people ‘children of God’ when you opposed marriage equality?” another whined.
Nobody said that when Barack Obama and Bill Clinton—who signed the Defense of Marriage Act—switched their positions. Instead, they were cheered for finally saying what the gay activists assumed they always believed.
Really? How do they know the Democrats’ conversions were more sincere than Portman’s? And how come Obama was never labeled a “hatemonger”?
This is nothing new. We all remember the character assassination of Miss California Carrie Prejean back in 2009. By saying that marriage should be between a man and a woman, Prejean did nothing more than restate the official position of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Bill Clinton—and every other Democrat that liberals had voted into office. There’s no doubt that Prejean’s Christianity—as well as her traditional femininity—determined how the media treated her. As Miss USA owner Donald Trump said, “If her beauty wasn’t so great, nobody really would have cared.”
In her book The New Thought Police, Tammy Bruce, a self-described “lesbian feminist activist,” revisited the gay movement’s crusade against radio host Dr. Laura Schlessinger. Because Dr. Laura opposed gay marriage on religious grounds and called homosexuality “a biological error,” groups like GLAAD tried to force her off the airwaves, mostly by harassing and intimidating advertisers.
“In case you are still convinced that the attacks on Laura Schlessinger, however out of control, were motivated by genuine concern, let me tell you about one person who is not on the gay establishment’s list of people to destroy: the rapper Eminem,” Bruce wrote.
Around the same time Dr. Laura was being hounded by GLAAD, Eminem was releasing songs in which he ranted about killing gays: “Kill you, you f*ggots keep egging me on” and “I’ll stab you in the head, whether you’re a f*g or a les.” Gay activists had little to say about it.
Why the double standard? “Dr. Laura is…a member of the newly marginalized—she’s conservative and she’s religious,” Bruce wrote. “Eminem, it’s safe to say, is neither.”
Fifteen years later, nothing has changed. Gay rights activists reserve the labels “bigot” “hater” and “homophobe” for certain people and not others, even if their professed beliefs are exactly the same. Apparently, only Christians, conservatives, and Republicans are capable of spreading “hate.”