If I got beaten to a pulp for being gay, any president is required to enforce the laws against assault, as are the local police. There is absolutely no need for hate crimes laws to bring violent individuals to justice. If the authorities tried to turn such an assault into a hate crime, I would strongly object. I am not a gay person first and foremost. I am a person. I need no liberal sanctimony to remind me of that.
It must be child's play to yank Sullivan around on a string. He refused to support hate crime legislation because he doesn't want people to think of him primarily as a gay person yet he is a conservative, who are people who think of him primarily as a gay person. And the people who do see him as a person first must be rejected because they are liberal, and liberals are not elite, and Sullivan is an elite, and elites are conservative. But conservatives see Sullivan as a gay man, not a person, and Sullivan is a person, not a gay person, but Sullivan is conservative....
Here is a visual representation of the inner workings of Sullivan's mind:
8 comments:
Ever since I saw Andrew Sullivan on Bill Maher's show a couple of years ago, I think of him as a guy who scratches his ass, inside his pants, before shaking hands with the other panelists at the show's closing.
Despite driftglass's Herculean efforts, society does not mock Andrew Sullivan as much as it should.
Sully has it bass-ackwards. We don't need hate crime laws based on how the victim feels about himself. We want them to announce how society feels about itself.
Hate crimes are to ordinary assault as treason is to industrial espionage, or as genocide is to murder. Larger issues are at stake than Andrew Sullivan's precious self-conception.
This is what's wrong with Kansas/Sullivan--he'd rather harm himself than give up his fantasy image of himself.
Like "quotas" for hiring minorities, many people think their rights are being infringed when Other's are protected.
Comments such as "Your right to smoke (or pollute) ends where my right to breath begins" are practically meaningless to them.
Another example of Sullivan's piffling, which he loves to imagine as nuanced complexity:
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/12/the-ides-of-2011.html
Observe as he cluelessly fumbles a major talking point:
"The wars, moreover, are done. In 2011, Obama got us out of Iraq on the schedule dictated by George W. Bush and Nouri al-Maliki. We have also done about as much damage as we can to al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan without active Pakistani support. We're outta there in two years anyway."
Yeah, anyway, whatever. Could he sound like more of a schmuck?
"A clear majority of Americans, moreover - 53 to 36 percent - believe that the current decade-long war is not worth fighting any more."
He makes it seem as if the public came to this conclusion fairly recently. But Sullivan, meditative conservative that he is, took a bit longer to brood it over. Sullivan is like McArdle: if he's not ready for something, no one else is, either.
But know hope, as he is endlessly fond of iterating:
"The brilliant capture and killing of Osama bin Laden by Seal Team Six closed an open wound. If we can reach back and remember why so many backed Obama in 2007, this really is the change we believed in."
It's enough to make a cat laugh, as Huck Finn would say. The wars are all done, Sullivan assures us, even as he hastens to mention "the vile regime in Tehran."
Oh, yes, Iran, which we're already striving to provoke into irreversible hostility. And by "we," I mean not us. We have not been we for a while. We haven't been feeling quite ourselves. Obama, however, who leads from behind with his incremental, conservative liberalism, knows us better. The powerful always inuit what we want: it manages, somehow, to be what they always want.
Think the wars are all done? Which wars, by the way? It's easy to lose count at this point.
This is just another iteration of 'screw you, I got mine'. Hate crimes don't just target a single person, they are meant to intimidate the entire group/community. Sullivan knows that very well, he just doesn't care about anyone but himself.
Also, happy new year everybody!
This is what's wrong with Kansas/Sullivan--he'd rather harm himself than give up his fantasy image of himself.
Well, of course. At this point, Sullivan does not so much have beliefs or a personality as he has a meticulously crafted image. He's gay, but he's not one of those noisy flamboyant types; he's conservative, but he's a Reasonable Conservative; he's Catholic, but not to a degree that discomfits the irreligious; etc. He constantly moderates all these qualities in order to preserve this chimeric accidental success of brand-building that's made him into someone that a preponderance of motherfuckers on the internet for some reason take seriously.
One envisions the Sullivan Brand-o-Matic, a device like a music producer's mixing board. This particular post of his is designed to keep the "gayness" slider well away from the "uppity faggot" end of the scale, and tip the "conservative/liberal" slider a few ticks to the right.
Also, I dunno if "harm himself" is the right way of putting it. He's a child of the elite and has been all his life, before and after he took an interest in fucking other dudes. I sincerely doubt his sexual preference has ever caused him any major inconvenience. Gay-bashing is something he reflects on with great sadness when he occasionally reads about it in the news.
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