Gays are the New Jews

[tedzbear]

Gays are the New Jews

The results of the election are very scary.

For one thing, the rest of the world will see this as the American people affirming a sharp imperial stance towards the rest of the world as well as approving the illegitimate occupation of Iraq. The implications of this perception are truly scary: this is regardless of what we know about Kerry and his pro-war campaign. Bush has just been elected with a majority of the popular vote. It will now be much easier for the likes of Osama Bin Ladin to recruit, pointing to the election of this administration composed of thoroughly exposed liars, our continuing disregard for Iraqi lives, the apparent ease with which we shrugged off the Abu Ghraib torture scandal...

For another thing, this election should never have happened --and accepted as legitimate-- with unverifiable voting machines manufactured by Bush supporters, under rules harking back to Jim Crow designed to make voting as hard and as frustrating as possible for people in minority neighborhoods, where the machines were sparser and lines much longer, and people with jobs who can't take the day off to wait in line for five hours. Yet, it happened this way and it's being reported as if it all were relatively glitch-free. The fact that such an inherently racist, anti-poor arrangement is being portrayed as legitimate and acceptable without much contestation does not bode well for the future.

Also, it's very clear from exit polls and other data that many of Bush's supporter were energized and mobilized by the "Ban Gay Marriage" amendments. The initiatives in all eleven states passed with wide margins. One exit poll shows that the issue with the highest "Which ONE issue mattered most in deciding how you voted today" rating was "Moral Values," with 21 percent of respondents choosing that option over the economy, terrorism, Iraq, health-care, taxes and education. And an overwhelming majority of people who professed to care about "moral values" voted for Bush -- 78 percent.

And you know the "moral values" is a code word for opposition to gay marriage and, to a lesser degree this time around, abortion. And some of the gay marriage amendments that passed do a lot more than define marriage as a heterosexual union: many also strip gay couples of the most basic, simple rights. Parental rights, visitation rights, medical decision-making, joint benefits are all under attack. This clearly is nothing more than a frenzy of bigotry since people could have penned these laws to ban only non-heterosexual marriage without such sweeping restrictions of the rights of gay people.

I have written about this in the past: many progressives understandably concentrate on issues like the fact that we are occupying Iraq rather than go out and work on things like marriage rights and health benefits for gay couples. And frankly, Americans of most stripes are very privileged compared to the rest of the world -- the AIDS holocaust in Africa is obviously a much more important issue than whether or not a gay couple can take the same mortgage tax deduction as straight couples.

But that's not the real issue here. Here's what's happening in a nutshell: a proto-fascist administration is whipping up support and clouding the political picture by aggressively targeting an already despised, small minority that is, for the most part, expressing no other wish than to assimilate as who they are. Many members of that minority are already relatively integrated into the existing power structure. Most are not poor or marginal but wish for not much more than being accepted into the existing institutional structures: the very structures that many progressives spend their lives fighting to change (for example, the military). Yes, the obvious anology is the Jews in pre-WWII Germany.

The anti-gay amendments that have just passed are comparable to the 1935 Nuremberg Laws in their function, if not their scope and final intent. These laws were passed in 1935, stripping Jews of many of their basic civic rights and erecting impassable barriers to the increasing assimilation of the Jewish minority into Germany.

I'm obviously not expecting an attempt to exterminate the gays. Anyway, as the Cheneys found out, homosexuality is not confined to any one group of easily identifiable people. Rather, what I'm saying is that the political uses of these amendments are similar to the Nuremberg Laws because they are the ideological stick with which the proto-fascist leadership can line up its own troops, while also creating and maintaining a political hegemony and monopoly over the majority of people, many of whom will also end up victimized by its very policies.

Posted by zeynep Underthesamesun.org

[starroute]

1. Gays were the old Jews, too

http://www.remember.org/witness/wit.vic.homo.html

Very little has been written about the tens of thousands of homosexuals who were the damnedest of the damned, the outcasts among the outcasts in the concentration camps. There are really only estimates of figures. During the twelve years of Nazi rule, nearly 50,000 were convicted of the crime of homosexuality. The majority ended up in concentration camps, and virtually all of them perished. According to a recent study, `at least 500,000 gays died in the Holocaust.' As Stefan Lorant observed in 1935, the homosexuals `lived in a dream', hoping that the heyday of gays in Germany of the 1920s would last forever. Their awakening was terrible. Yet, the few survivors among them did not qualify for postwar restitution as the Jews or the politicals, because as homosexuals they were outside the law. By German law, homosexuality was a crime. After the prison sentences most homosexuals were automatically shipped to concentration camps. In 1935, a new law legalized the `compulsory sterilization (often in fact castration) of homosexuals.' A special section of the Gestapo dealt with them. Along with epileptics, schizophrenics and other `degenerates', they were being eliminated. Yet homosexuality was still so widespread that in 1942 the death penalty was imposed for it in the army and the SS.


http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005261

The destruction of the Institute was a first step toward eradicating an openly gay or lesbian culture from Germany. Police closed bars and clubs such as the "Eldorado" and banned publications such as Die Freundschaft (Friendship). In this early stage the Nazis drove homosexuals underground, destroying their networks of support. In 1934, the Gestapo (secret state police) instructed local police forces to keep lists of all men engaged in homosexual activities. Police in many parts of Germany had in fact been doing this for years. The Nazis used these "pink lists" to hunt down individual homosexuals during police actions.

On June 28, 1935, the Ministry of Justice revised Paragraph 175. The revisions provided a legal basis for extending Nazi persecution of homosexuals. Ministry officials expanded the category of "criminally indecent activities between men" to include any act that could be construed as homosexual. The courts later decided that even intent or thought sufficed. On October 26, 1936, Himmler formed within the Security Police the Reich Central Office for Combating Abortion and Homosexuality. Josef Meisinger, executed in 1947 for his brutality in occupied Poland, led the new office. The police had powers to hold in protective custody or preventive arrest those deemed dangerous to Germany's moral fiber, jailing indefinitely--without trial--anyone they chose. In addition, homosexual prisoners just released from jail were immediately re-arrested and sent to concentration camps if the police thought it likely that they would continue to engage in homosexual acts.

From 1937 to 1939, the peak years of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, the police increasingly raided homosexual meeting places, seized address books, and created networks of informers and undercover agents to identify and arrest suspected homosexuals. On April 4, 1938, the Gestapo issued a directive indicating that men convicted of homosexuality could be incarcerated in concentration camps. Between 1933 and 1945 the police arrested an estimated 100,000 men as homosexuals. Most of the 50,000 men sentenced by the courts spent time in regular prisons, and between 5,000 and 15,000 were interned in concentration camps.

[bloom]

2. I think liberals are the "new Jews"

:hangover:

[puddycat]

3. its not only gays today who are targetted--its all the groups Nazis hated

The fascist * administration is targetting the mentally ill, the physically disabled, the intelligensia, the far left, etc. -- all groups that Nazis singled out for extermination. For example, * is working with drug companies to initiate a nation-wide testing of all people, for "mental illnesses". Of course, the real reason for this is social control. Anyone out of line gets automatically labelled as mentally ill and can be tossed in a hospital with no rights. (remember, individuals in mental hospitals have the least rights of anyone in this society. Even prisoners in regular prisons have dates which they are released. Patients have none.)

[LSdemocrat]

4. Don't forget about American Muslims as well

If Ashcroft could, he'd lock everyone of us up.