Boy, it's a week of unusual strikeouts over at The Daily Dish...
First, calling Barney Frank a sometime "total asshole"; then (in the same breath) picking, picking, picking at the ugly scab of the unknown, pressing need to develop a front-page politics of lesser IQ by race well in advance of the science on it; and finally blasting the 'hard left' about Israel's manipulative pinkwashing.
[I have to take this one up, because I heard Netanyahu mention gays in his Knesset speech and I was thinking, "How very odd." I'm not sure I've ever heard that before.]
Let's start with something easy to analogize from. Senator Bob Corker goes to an auto plant opening and congratulates himself on what "we've done here". Of course, he visibly and ultimately opposed what was done. It is the same level of duplicity that some leftists and level-headed rightists sneer at, when a rightwing Israeli government, that depends on and cultivates its support from rabidly anti-gay groups, gets up and launches into "Look at Israel. We're so progressive on gay rights. :-)" True, the Israeli right is not nearly as captured on this topic as the American right, but still.
Kirchick, now marching in pride parades organized by liberals, one supposes, writes:
The first fallacy of the pinkwashing meme is that it’s a non sequitur. No one is saying that Israel ought to be immune from criticism because it treats gay people humanely. Israel’s stellar record on gay rights does not prevent anyone from condemning the country’s settlement policies,
To the contrary, I think the record will show that some people, including Kirchick, have argued exactly that, in particular, that gays-against-apartheid really have no place in a gay pride parade, say, because one must put the gay issue first.
Beyond that is a rightwing Israeli mincing that falls hard on liberals, not unlike how clear-minded liberals bristled when conservatives intoned that Ronald Reagan was a 'nice guy', and if he had to illegally mine harbors in South America, that was just what daddy did at the office, to borrow a phrase.
In this, the current Israeli government/leadership seems so smugly assured that their 'imposed compromise' is moral truth and not conceit that it is no wonder that people are raising questions about pinkwashing...
