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raq.<\/strong>\n
\nThe link between all these is the continuing U.S. war in Afghanistan. But you would be hard pressed to find any mention of that from LGBTQ NGO “activists” talking about Orlando, or from anyone talking about Dallas.
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\nYet many self-professed \u201cprogressive\u201d LGBTQs are loud in their support of \u201cintersectionality<\/a>,\u201d a term which means the finding of common cause within and among groups of the oppressed. Yet aside from pointing out the obvious, that most of the Orlando victims were LGBTQ and Latino, and to lesser extent, that people shouldn\u2019t scapegoat Muslims in the U.S., their response to the Orlando massacre abjectly failed the test of genuine intersectionality.
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\nInstead, it was the same old tunnel vision, the familiar nationalist myopia of LGBTQs in the U.S. thinking only about \u201cour issues,\u201d with the rest of the world, gay and non-gay, as a distant after-thought at best.
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\nThe result is that tragedies like the Pulse nightclub attack are hijacked by the professional political class for crass political gain. Consider the Democrats\u2019 phony Congressional sit-in to force Republicans to take up the issue of gun control: Rather than address the conditions that give rise to violence, the Democrats promoted the most reactionary, anti-civil libertarian, pro-national security state \u201creforms\u201d under the rubric of gun control. Anyone on the executive branch\u2019s national security \u201cwatch list\u201d — with no oversight of the selection criteria used and no due process procedure for getting off the list — is denied the right to own a gun.
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\nTo say that this reinforces a horrible precedent is an understatement. It unconstitutionally augments the government\u2019s unilateral power to penalize those, particularly people of color, who it designates as \u201csecurity risks,\u201d with implications far beyond gun control and freedom of movement.
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\nIn diverting an anti-LGBTQ tragedy into reactionary legislation, the Congressional sit-iners were in familiar territory. After the 1998 murder of Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard, Congressional Democrats ignored the hate-inducing, anti-LGBTQ legislation that they had played the primary role in promoting \u2013 Bill Clinton\u2019s 1996 Defense of Marriage Act and his 1993 Don\u2019t Ask, Don\u2019t Tell law. Instead, they promoted \u201chate crimes\u201d legislation that only served to promote Clinton\u2019s mass incarceration binge which was already devastating communities of color.
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\nA true, intersectional approach to the Orlando tragedy would have helped expose and deflect this crass opportunism.
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\nFor while gun violence here currently dominates U.S. domestic politics, the longest war in U.S. history \u2013 where gun violence is on steroids \u2013 drags on in Afghanistan. But of course neither liberals nor conservatives, Democrats nor Republicans, like to talk about that. After all, they\u2019re the ones approving the appropriations that continue the drone bombings, that maintain hundreds of U.S. bases worldwide while building new ones, and that fund the U.S. role as the world\u2019s biggest arms exporter, many of them to the most venal, brutal regimes. But gun control Democrats are almost entirely silent about that.
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\nAlmost two generations ago the U.S. attempted to dominate Southeast Asian countries by propping up a hopelessly corrupt client state in South Vietnam. The U.S. knew that that state would collapse like a house of cards if it exited the country. Today, presidents both Democratic and Republican follow much the same script in Afghanistan, with traumatic results there, but also \u201ccollateral damage\u201d back home in Orlando and Dallas. The U.S. client regime is so illegitimate<\/a> in the eyes of Afghans that despite many billions of dollars of latest high-tech war making gadgetry and a decade and a half of U.S. and other foreign troops, \u201cThe Taliban controls more territory than it has since the U.S.-led invasion there began in 2001, according to U.N. estimates.\u201d
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\nToday\u2019s LGBT NGO\u2019s are rightly derided as \u201cGay, Inc.”<\/a> [2]<\/a>Genuflecting to their Democratic Party allies, their intersectionality pales in comparison to the young LGBTQ movement that emerged out of the Stonewall Rebellion, which put real intersectionality into practice well before the term was even coined.
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\nSo unlike the National LGBTQ Task Force\u2019s opposition to the 2003 Iraq invasion, which was grudging and tepid<\/a>, with \u201cactivism\u201d largely confined to issuing press releases, the earlier movement, was in the streets making common cause against the war. At a time of rampant, violent government repression, they showed active solidarity with the Black Panthers and others fighting for justice on \u201cnon-LGBTQ\u201d issues. While Stonewall era organizations regularly organized numerous protests, The Task Force probably hasn\u2019t initiated a single street protest in decades, at best passively lending its name to activities organized by others.
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\nWhen Chelsea Manning was brutalized in military prisons for exposing U.S. forces\u2019 slaughter of journalists and civilians in Iraq, the U.S. slaughter of Afghan civilians, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton\u2019s support of Honduran military coup, the Task Force and the rest of the LGBT NGOs sat on their hands<\/a>, and some actively encouraged her prosecution. And recently, despite escalating racist ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the Task Force allowed pro-Israel forces<\/a>[2]<\/a> to hold a reception at their annual conference in Chicago.
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\nWhich leads to the fundamental question: Who really leads the LGBT movement? Gay, Inc. \u2013 or the Democratic Party and its corporate backers to whom it owes fealty? As Burkely Hermannsuggests<\/a>, \u201cfollow the money\u2026. The banksters who helped plunge the [2008] world economy into economic crisis sponsored a number of organizations including the HRC, NGLTF, GLAD, PFLAG, NGLCC, Out and Equal, GLSEN, and GLAAD.\u201d
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\nAnd who are these sponsors? Too big to fail Wells Fargo<\/a>,Citibank<\/a> and GoldmanSachs. But also defense giant Northrup Grumann<\/a> and giant oil polluters BP and Shell. And of course Nike, with its atrocious human rights record in places likeMalaysia<\/a>, Pakistan and Vietnam<\/a>.
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\nToday these giant corporations find it convenient to their bottom line to appear gay-friendly. But all that can turn on a dime. In the U.S., support for LGBTQ rights is fairly broad though far from universal. History has shown that such support can rapidly wither in severe economic downturns. We must be vigilant and principled. In the wake of Orlando, when Gay, Inc. and its political allies confine the messaging to banalities like \u201chate is bad,\u201d or worse, divert people towards reactionary legislation, we must oppose them.
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\nWhen Democrats or Republicans express remorse over the Orlando massacre, we must implement true intersectionality by exposing their hypocrisy. We must point out that their support of U.S. domination of large areas of the world fuels the very violence they say they oppose.
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\nNo matter how unpalatable and unpopular it may be to others in denial, we must stand with the savage truth: Bipartisan drone bombings, invasions, massive arms exports, support for dictators and ethnic cleansing regimes like apartheid Israel have fueled violence in the Middle East and South Asia to a scale never before seen in history.
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\nWe must insist that if we are serious about ending the violent blowback seen in Orlando and Dallas, we must end the decades of U.S. military domination of South Asia and the Middle East as well.<\/strong>
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– By Andy Thayer, with help from Roger Fraser and Bob Schwartz<\/em><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"