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Notes from Anti-LGBT Activism Talk on 3/1
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- Jeffrey Longhofer, Ph.D., LCSW Associate professor from Rutgers school of social work
- April 9th, EEO on LGBT population
- Interactive session.
- Philip Lichtenberg
- Encountering Bigotry
- Cheryl Parks
- White, out lesbian
- Dr. Christine McGinn
- Transgender plastic surgeon
- Queer white man
- Does this affect perspective?
- Anti-LGBT Activism: A Social Movement or Paranoid Fringe?
- A handful of images from Oklahoma City, April 19, 1995, 9:02 AM
- On the first floor of a building was a childcare center. 72 children. By the end of the excavation there were 16. 168 fatalities (bombing)
- When I speak to undergraduates, I find that memory of this is quite distant
- Quite right
- Timothy McVeigh – news media tended to present him as a homosexual
- Estes Park, 1992
- YMCA, 200 or 300 people. National meeting of the …?
- Opposition researcher
- New right, old right, neo vs. paleo
- Can’t mobilize unless you can really grasp the historical significance of divides in American conservatism
- The Rise of the Old Right
- AR Conference
- http://vdare.com/
- Amren.com/conference2012/
- “Ours is an era of fear and self-censorship. Virtually no whites are willing to break taboos about racial differences in IQ, the costs of “diversity,” or the challenges of non-white immigration. We are different. We believe these are vital questions.”
- Click to conference page
- Beyond homophobia…neofascist? How to describe?
- One of my agendas here is to convince you that these folks are not a paranoid fringe.
- Inaccurate
- Their movement is just as powerful and significant
- If you start to think for a moment that they’re on the margins, you won’t be able to strategically organize against them.
- Many organizations simply miss this
- The Paranoid Style in American Politics
- He was wrong
- Led us away from thinking of the right wing as a social movement
- As scholars and activists, we can’t afford to make these mistakes
- Agenda
- My interest in the subject: opposition research
- Scope of anti-lgbt social movement activity
- The argument: new social movements vs paranoid style
- Rise of the right: paleo and neo-conservatives
- Some historical background on anti-lgbt activity
- Current anti-lgbt activity
- The Koch brothers, the tea party
- Strategies for political mobilization
- Metropolitan Opera funded by the Koch family
- Tea Party wouldn’t be running the house without Koch ($$$)
- Ron Paul
- http://blog.mises.org/11414/is-gay-marriage-a-constitutional-right/
- Who donates to these organizations?
- Very hard to track the money
- Koch brothers – over $40 million since the last election
- Large degree of interest inspired by Ron Paul
- Ludwig von Mises Institute
- This particular slice of libertarianism is very, very homophobic
- The Federal Society
- Some neo-cons but an increasing number of paleo-cons
- Legal scholars, legal thinks, legal activists
- Radical states’ rights folks
- So conservative that they’re too conservative for William Buckley
- Why be concerned about them? Because they’re huge. Their budget has got to be larger than HRC’s—does that concern you? That might not be true, but it’s big.
- The Pink Swastika
- Steve Lively
- “…we knew [this book] would cause controversy, contradicting as it does the common portrayal of homosexuals as exlusively victims of the nazi regime. For tis reason we were scrupulous in our documentation of homosexuals as the true inventors of Nazism…”
- defendthefamily.com
- Go on Amazon…recently many of their critical comments/reviews disappeared.
- Posts from activists have been deleted. Only positive results remain
- Long timeline:
- 1969 – In the same year that we have Stonewall, the Posse Comitatus formed
- The far, far right
- 1973 – Heritage Foundation established
- 1977 – Focus on the Family formed, Cato Institute formed (backed with Kock money)
- 1978 – C A Briggs initiative
- 1979 – Moral Majority formed Falwell and Weyrich
- Paul Weyrich was one of the architects of the direct mail campaign
- Teaching Falwell the basics of politics
- 1980 – Traditional Values Coalition, Kochs fund LP (libertarian party) candidate Ed Clark
- Ed was to be present in 1992 in Estes Park.
- 1983 – Gordon Kahl killed 2 federal marshalls in Missouri. Was a member of the Posses Comitatus
- 1984 – Reagan Reelected
- 1985 – George Grant Bringing in the Sh…ves?
- 1989 – Bush sr. elected President.
- 1992 – Clinton elected to first term
- 2000 – 70 m voter guides to support George W. Bush
- 2003 – Dr. Tom Coburn, favors death penalty for abortionists
- 2002 – Justice A. Scalia “Government is Minister of God”
- 1990 – Ralph Reed
- 1995 – OKC bombing
- 1996 – DOMA passed
- 1997 – PNAC formed
- 1991 – Cold War ends
- 1992 – Clinton elected to first term
- 1986 – Oregon’s Citizen Alliance formed
- 2004 – Coalition scorecards US Senate
- 2005 – Constitution restoration act
- 2008 – Prop 8 passes CA
- 2011 – Rep Giffords shot
- Short wave radio
- Right reactions to Climenti suicide
- ‘Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association said gay rights activists “pressure these students to declare a disordered sexual preference when they’re to oyoung to know better, [so] they share some culpability.”’
- ‘Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, a key critic of anti-bullying programs, said gay activists were “exploiting these tragedies to push their agenda.” He said that gay kids may kjnow “intuitively” that their desires are “abnormal” and that the claim, pushed by gay activists, that they can’t change “may create a sense of despair that can lead to suicide.”’
- ‘Matt Barber of Liberty Counsel said those activists want “to use the tragedies to increase pressure on the real victims: Christians.”’
- Liberty University/Liberty Counsel backed by Koch
- These people are our neighbors—they are not a psychological aberration
- David Brinkley
- Wrote an essay that leaves on LGBT dimensions of this
- Two Arguments
- Rightward Shift of Center and the Implications for LGBT political mobilization
- New social movement theory offers better account of anti-LGBT activity/action than Paranoid Fringe or old social movement theory
- Dixie crack movement
- Wallace campaign acted as a catalyst
- Anxieties about “will we survive”
- Aracial politics
- Wrote the Radical ___
- Movements as very race-driven.
- The center does not hold
- If you consider the LGBT movement aimed at trying to create new names.
- New social movements
- NSM theory focuses on culture and struggle over control of production of meaning.
- NSM theory looks at constitution of new collective identities
- Including the right
- Allan Bloom – conservative, died of AIDS
- Critical of the idea that LGBT people, people of color could even be part of social movements
- Social movements: ours and theirs
- Tendency to use different theories for movements we agree with and those we disagree with
- Our own movements
- Opponents
- Irrational, deluded even motivated by evil
- Doesn’t work any longer. This kind of thinking has failed us.
- Extreme or one?
- Emotionally disturbed or social movement activists shifting the center?
- Fred Phelps Westboro Baptist Church
- Helped hold him up as an example of someone who is so far out of the mainstream
- Don’t believe in Richard hofsteder’s thesis!
- Brave enough to say what million of people are thinking
- NARTH
- National….therapy homosexuality
- 25% of funding from Kochs
- Were in oil and gas business
- Purpose of opposition research is to expose and shame
- Kind of a pity sometimes, but it works
- CBN – Christian Broadcast Network
- Broadcast right after Brokeback Mountain
- Culmination of the Hollywood conspiracy
- “People who put faith and truth above the lies of political correctness”
- Americans for Truth Hour
- Opposing gay agenda
- Radical Marxist hate group??
- “Archbigot”
- “we tried to represent the other side”
- “They are truly a hate group”
- Matt Barber
- Liberty University
- Neo-cons
- Andrew Sullivan
- William Buckley
- Sen. Henry Scoop Jackson
- Francis Fukuyama
- Crystals
- Broder (not anti-gay)
- Neo-con movement has a lot of different tendencies in it
- Paleo-cons
- Sarah Palin
- Michelle Bachmann
- Howard Phillips
- Reagan administration
- Paleo-cons are isolationists: they don’t support going to wars (but neo-cons do)
- Roots in WWII movement called America First
- Pat Buchannan considers himself as a part of America First
- Buckley and Buchannan had a break—Buckley couldn’t deal with his paleo-conservatism
- The center has shifted further and further to the right – don’t recognize how deep their paleo-conservative roots are
- CEO of Target donated to Bachmann’s campaign. Donation happened to be right as she was articulating her anti-gay agenda
- They refused to back off of this
- Through convoluted politics they tried to soften the blow
- Palin’s entry into presidential campaign has been exemplary in showing how far politics have shifted to the right
- Rev. Pete Peters from LaPorte, CO
- Quoting Leviticus – SO FUNNY
- He’s using the word queers but I bet he’s not doing it to be politically correct
- Homosexuals = perverts
- “There’s a wipeout coming in this country”
- “Homosexuality is a sin in the bible” video
- Broadcasts daily to 15,000 AM stations
- Christian Reconstructionism, Christian Identity
- White Christian identity movement has permeated the far right of the right movment
- Concern: all of these other right movements of the past that led to Phillips and Buchannan being a part of the Reagan administration, this stuff will eventually push us in the same direction.
- While it seems weird and odd and extreme, you can’t help but note that this was a place where Howard Phillips stands.
- These Christian identity people were at the table (Estes Park 1992) and were setting the agenda for it
- “People of color are ‘pre-Adamic mud people…”
- You read it and I read it and you think that it has to be a part of paranoia
- How did you feel being at meetings with these people?
- Scared, sometimes
- The time I was the most scared was when I brought a friend and at the registration table they heard him say “What name should I use?”
- Lenny Ziskind – lots of training, fake IDs
- At the meeting was very anxious
- Keynote speaker was a retired U.S. colonel
- Many retired military officers in this movement
- Claimed to have aerial shots (pre-Cold War) of Soviet tanks on the Baja peninsula
- “Sergei, shut up!”
- “They’ve tried to kill Lenny” (gestures) “a dozen times, more”
- Has to travel with pretty extensive security
- Leonard Zeskind, “Blood and Politics”
- Right wing has always flirted with the organic movement. Pure people…pure water…pure food.
- German Nazi organic movement literature
- Roots in fascism
- Queers and people of colors as “impure”
- Someone brings up Tim Miller
- Father Donahue issued a statement saying that the subject matter is objectionable
- Not as if he would have been performing, just would have been a playwriting workshop
- Some are saying that he’s should repent for acknowledging homosexuality, etc. etc.
- “oh they’re just fringe people…” but are they?
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