Whelp…the gays had a nice little run
When dipshit centrists played along with the right-wing’s anti-trans hysteria, they were fools to think the right-wing was going to be satisfied with disappearing trans people. I even remember a dipshit sober centrist commenter here joining in. Good times.
It Was A Good Few Years, In Some Ways
Starbucks has banned Pride decorations in its stores halfway through Pride Month, the company’s workers union claimed Tuesday, in a stunning cave to far-right anti-LGBTQ fury.
Three words: Brew Ha Ha.
I was ahead of my time with my longstanding Starbucks boycott.
I too joined the ranks as well at one cup and done, as in “I can make crappy coffee at home”. Having said that greed will halt the haters with time. It’s been speculated 10% of the population is gay, I suspect it’s a good bit higher. Here’s the thing: Greed is the inner core of all things corporate, money their only reason to exist. Notice that paragon of Christianity Chick-fil-a is now deemed “woke” due to having a diversity program, the reason is (Drum Roll) Money! There is little sense to listening to the haters, and in the words of a band manager on playing gay weddings: “They Got Money!”. Yep, they do, that and I hear the weddings are a blast.
I am very pro-Starbucks employees unionizing… however, I’ve read the reports and honestly more than a little skeptical. Starbucks has ALWAYS been very pro-LGBTQ+ even before marriage equality when most corporations jumped on the bandwagon. Can’t understand why the union employees would think this helps their cause.
Don’t blame the “dipshit sober centrists” for this slow rolling disaster. The blame falls squarely on a subset of young activists who were looking for a social justice cause but were born too late to be part of the most pivotal movements of the past 7 decades.
Many of us counseled the younger generation to avoid excess and flamboyance for its own sake; they instead ignored us, turned pride from an internally-focused celebration of solidarity into a gentrified corporate juggernaut that has ultimately let them down and chummed the waters with unlimited right-wing agitprop.
The trans identity movement has single-handedly set he entire LGBT equality movement back at least to the passage of DOMA. The identity movement has little to do with simply living one’s life as the opposite gender – back in the early 90s, I knew quite a few trans individuals, although we hardly used that term at the time. They simply lived as the men or women they knew they were; without compelling everyone around them to wallow in a self indulgent existential crisis of trans-ness.
It’s no surprise that the trans identity movement picked up right after obergerfell. After a major victory, a lot of the young activists and allies were without direction. Rather than batten down and do the less glamorous work of keeping solidarity and defending existing rights, they doubled down during the trump years and chose to draw attention to a minority of a minority, often for their own self-aggrandizement. In what may be a textbook case of toxic allyship, the net result of almost a decade of the trans identity movement been a a nationwide regression in both rights and discourse.
I don’t advocate LGB without the T. I do think that identity movements and advocacy should be proportionate to need and not crafted to intentionally alienate current and future allies.
This is….something.
Gee, wonder why they didn’t listen to you…
Their loss. We got them to obergerfell and in less than a decade we are watching it all unravel.
..”we” got “them”…
You’re a legitimately awful person.
You must be fun at parties.
Speak of the dipshit centrist and he will appear.
You have articulated what I have been trying to articulate to myself and have been unable to
The Stonewall uprising, when the LGBTQs fought back against waves of police crackdowns, was very alienating to a lot of people.
Thank you.
It took over 40 years to get federal recondition of marriage. Riots didn’t force anyone’a hand, it was hard work by a lot of average, boring gay men and women living their lives bravely and honestly. Their stories and efforts are diminished when ignorant people who can’t understand nuance and strategy shout “respectability politics”
@Jean: For your consideration
Ever hear of the strategy “divide and conquer”? Let’s look at how it worked on a different issue.
You remember when a couple of people — nobody in actual power, just a couple of emotionally stirred-up activists — said “defund the police” during the George Floyd protests? It was never put forward as a serious policy, just a suggestion that, for example, we should put more money into people trained to deal with mental health episodes, rather than on police who often deal with such situations by shooting the person having a breakdown.
What they meant didn’t matter, and what they said barely mattered. In a matter of days the Fasco-Republicans claimed that was the position of the Democratic Party, prompting fearful Democratic politicians to run away even from the valid, long-overdue project of limiting police power.
They took the most outrageous thing said by some activist somewhere and blew it entirely out of proportion and in so doing drove a wedge between activists and moderates. The narrative pushed was that by asking for too much, the activists doomed us to getting nothing at all.
Here’s my point: If no activist had said it, they would have simply made it up, like they did about pizza parlor basements. They want you to blame the activists.
This is their oldest tactic. They’ve been using it for decades, maybe centuries, because it still works amazingly well.
I don’t blame all activists. I blame a subset of younger activists who came of age during the Obama years that had neither the context nor experience for what the slow grind of social justice actually looks like. They failed to read the room and made the situation objectively worse for an already marginalized group.
I don’t buy the idea that this is a divide and conquer strategy on the part of the right wing. This was a self inflicted wound that is being capitalized upon after the fact
A lot of “respectable Negroes” sounded just like this in about 1962.
And, with all due respect, if you’re being played I wouldn’t expect you’d realize it.
Keep beating the drum of respectability politics, I’ll keep giving an honest critique of the situation
No, you’ll give your opinion, just like everybody else. “Honest” has nothing to do with it.
There is a grain of truth in the observation that after the initial victories, L, G, B, T, and Q aren’t all necessarily on the same page about everything. Democrats make the same mistake by treating “Hispanics” as a bloc.
Or gays, for that matter. Log Cabin Republicans exist, for reasons I can’t fathom.
And….scene.
Thanks everyone. This thread has done a great job proving the entire point of the post.