Seizing The Platform

     I don’t have a lot to say this morning, but one article at Breitbart deserves special mention:

     The Guardian called the rise of free-thinking, LGBT conservatives “troubling” in an article on Thursday. The article, written by Arwa Mahdawi, criticized popular LGBT conservatives, including former OUT Magazine employee Chadwick Moore, who was fired after coming out as a conservative, and the Log Cabin Republicans, attempting to paint right-wing LGBT men and women as an “influential group of gay, white, and financially well-off men,” made up of Nazis, white nationalists, and misogynists.

     Moore has faced repeated discrimination since coming out as a conservative; losing his job, and even being warned by Scruff, a dating app for gay, bisexual, and transgender men, for being openly pro-Trump on the platform.

     “We are less than merely second-class citizens in the gay community, we are reviled, much like black conservatives and any other minority group that says ‘no’ to the Left’s victimhood politics,” Moore previously declared to Breitbart News.

     This is an important development in the war for freedom of expression. The SJWs’ attempts to delegitimize the voices of black conservatives and libertarians began decades ago, targeting figures such as Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and Glenn Loury. Many attempts have been made to “de-platform” them: i.e., to use vilification and threats to “persuade” those who provide them an outlet for their views to retract it. Some of those attempts were successful, but not enough of them to squelch all conservative sentiment among blacks. Yet the efforts continue.

     No doubt the Left was confident, having “owned” the “LGBT rights” issue practically since inception, that it could do a better job of keeping those folks on the plantation. But as James Hogan has told us, a strong sense of confidence is always misplaced. A swelling number of LGBTers are looking at the evidence and doing their own thinking – and evidence and reason are the Left’s bitterest enemies.

     SJWs have effectively seized control of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. They’ve contrived to intimidate major Internet corporations such as Google. They hope to conquer the Internet, the foremost communications channel of our time, as thoroughly as they did the printed press and the major television networks. Their drives in these regards will not cease any time soon.

     The LGBT community has special problems in this regard. For one thing, its media are tightly focused: explicitly oriented toward the LGBT audience, with little that would appeal to normal heterosexuals. For another, those media were born from the “LGBT rights” movement and are integral with it. Therefore, they are already the “property” of the Left; the Right is unlikely to win them away. Finally – and not to be discounted, as little as we might like it – many on the Right do exhibit disdain, even contempt, for sexual deviates.

     If we want to provide a “safe place” for LGBT conservatives and libertarians, we have quite a lot of work to do – and some of that work must be on ourselves.

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     As it happens, today’s Gospel reading was one I consider supremely important to rational Christian thought:

     But the Pharisees, seeing that he had silenced the Sadducees, came together. And one of them, a doctor in the law, asked him, tempting him: Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said to him: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like to this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments dependeth the whole law and the prophets. [Matthew 22:34-40, Douay-Rheims translation]

     “Thy neighbor” is anyone who has come near you. That is the exact meaning of the word. There are no exceptions. To the extent that homosexuals, bisexuals, and transgendered individuals approach us in any dimension, they become our neighbors, to be loved and protected: yes, from hostile outside forces, but equally from any inclination of our own to despise them.

     Their sexual preferences and tastes are not yours; you do not have to answer for them and you never will. But you will be called to answer for your treatment of your neighbor, whether his nearness is geographical, spiritual, or political. Indeed, willingness to accept him whose sexual preferences you regard as distasteful or sinful, so long as he harms no one, as a valued neighbor and an equal partner in the community may count heavily in your favor at the Bar of Judgment.

     Christ said as much. You don’t want to argue with Him, do you?