Rehabilitating Dean Barnett
Glen Greenwald has the take on whether the moral compass of some Right-side commentators doesn't shift with the political breezes a bit too easily.
I don't want to pick on Dean, but perhaps he will be willing, to some unknown extent, to be used as a strawman for what constructive effort is possible across the isle that some of his foot soldiers dig such deep trenches along.
Here are a few reflections on his latest effort to make sense of sexual ethics.
1. “My private life is private, and will remain that way,” everyone would have understood the coded message and backed off."
Confident that the closet is torture enough, I'm all for giving people the personal space required to come out. The question, Dean, is why don't you and yours offer a welcome mat for them to do so in your own party, which would also solve your problem with Mr. Rogers.
2. "But spending a lot of time around gays in my neighborhood, at the gym and at work, I got to know the community. Good people. "
*sigh* You need to go further, Dean. Just jettison wholesale the entire perspective that gay people are morally deficient and need to prove themselves to the worthy as themselves worthy.
The capacity of individuals to act well or poorly has nothing to do with their gayness.
3. "Anyway, my point is that as a Jew, I rush to remind my Gentile friends and readers that this man doesn’t speak for me." ... "It would be to insist that as a community, the people who engage in antics like that are outliers and degenerates."
Unlike your political contingent, quite a lot of liberals don't see themselves in the business of standing in Judgment of people, declaring them degenerates. Some of us actually believe in condemning acts, rather than people.
Your lecture to build faith with those who might (deliberately?) misinterpret Craig's actions as illustrative rather than to point out the artful dodges and hypocrisies of the political Right on the same matters seems oddly placed. If someone does something good or bad, chances are that it reflects on their personal character, rather than anything related to, say, their Jewishness, their Muslim practices, or their red-headedness, right?
All that is even before your request that we all gainsay Craig's repeated public denial that he's gay - why would the gay community be required to formally distance itself from someone who says they aren't gay?
The "Gay Community", by and large, stands for the advancement of civil rights and for services to its own. As such, it's not tied conceptually to the moral trials and tribulations or political successes and failures of any one individual.
Last on Abe Foxman.
There is another point of view that he is a casualty of concerted and misconceived attempt - by the right-wing Jewish community in America? - to use the US as a megaphone to push the hot buttons of Israel's perceived enemies.
As such, you have Mr. Lantos doing such brilliantly conceived things (*cough*) as introducing legislation to condemn stoning on the eve of the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, at the hour when America needs maximal Arab-Muslim support. (!)
Now, he has the Armenian genocide hot-topic ...
