Educating Huckabee: The Terrible History of Systematic Violence Directed At Gays

[McCamy Taylor]

Mike Huckabee has said that gays and lesbians do not need protection of their civil rights, because they have not been the victims of systematic violence like racial minorities.

http://www.towleroad.com/2008/11/huckabee-gays-n.html

I wonder what Mike Huckabee has been smoking.

I. Nazi Germany



There were several different kinds of triangles which the Nazis forced enemies of the state to wear. We all know about the yellow double triangle---a Star of David---for the Jews. A red triangle meant that you were a communist or political enemy. A pink triangle was for a homosexual.

Here is a site called Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals that Huckabee ought to read.

http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/hsx/

If he did, he would find out that 15,000 gay men died in Nazi concentration camps alongside other victims of the Holocaust. Hundreds of gay men were forcibly castrated. 100,000 were arrested and 50,000 were sent to prison while others were confined to mental institutions as “insane”.

Nazi Germany did not seek to kill all homosexuals. Nevertheless, the Nazi state, through active persecution, attempted to terrorize German homosexuals into sexual and social conformity, leaving thousands dead and shattering the lives of many more.

You can take this last paragraph and insert the name of just about any western country---including ours.

II. The Inquisition

If you like to read history, here is something for you.

http://books.google.com/books?id=y8_Ya2s3zN8C&pg=PA192&lpg=PA192&dq=Inquisition+homosexuals&source=web&ots=4LzPMz9R4T&sig=xSHrMCR7WcUC9YzJY3Q7TaUt8Yw&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=7&ct=result

The author makes the case that the Inquisition latched onto sodomy or homosexuality as another crime it could persecute in the early 16th century for political reasons. Note that gays were sentenced to death (often by burning) in secular courts all across Europe, as well, and that in some places being gay had been a capital offense as far back as the Middle Ages. England continued to execute gays into the 18th century.

Intolerance of homosexuality had lots of uses. It could justify the enslavement of the native people of the Americas by the Spanish Conquistadors and their friends in the Church.

http://academic.reed.edu/english/Courses/English341gs/FinalPaper/MeganL/berdache_web.html

This apparent and intrinsic relationship between homosexual relations and their religious activity was deeply troubling to the Spanish conquerors. It added to their beliefs that the natives were devils, and it caused an even stronger gap to separate the two groups. Because sodomy was present in the religious realm of the natives, Trexler argues that in their contemporary legal view, "sodomy or male homosexual behavior, however, did bestow a right to conquer, if it could be demonstrated that it was widespread and tolerated by indigenous civil authority" (Trexler, 83-4). The punishment of the "sodomites" by the Spanish is well documented and is clearly revealed in de Bry's etching of "Balboa's Dogs Attacking a Group of Panamanian Sodomites."

III. Joe McCarthy

Here is an interview with David K. Johnson, the author of The Lavender Scare a book about the attack on gays and lesbians that was waged by the people who terrorized America in their quest to weed out communist subversives.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/404811in.html

According to Johnson, under Roosevelt and Truman, the federal government and the DC area had become relatively friendly to gays. The same folks who tried to turn the country abruptly towards the right during the Cold War decided to play upon the nation’s fear of homosexuals by starting a gay witch hunt. They purged thousands of government workers who were gay, forced many others to quit rather than endure interrogations. They also caused thousands of private sector employees to lose their jobs, because they could no longer get a security clearance. Homosexuality was supposed to make an employee subject to communist blackmail, you see. Also,

A variation on the blackmail rationale—one expressed in many tabloid journals of the 1950s—held that communists promoted "sex perversion" among American youth as a way to weaken the country and clear the path for a communist takeover. In this line of reasoning, homosexuals (especially effeminate gay men) acted as a fifth column, by preventing family formation and fostering moral decay.

Purity of Essence, anyone?



IV. The American Medical Association

Until 1973, the AMA declared that gays were mentally ill. Hard to believe, but true.

In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association listed homosexuality in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) as a sociopathic personality disturbance. A comprehensive study of homosexuality in 1962 justified inclusion of the disorder as a pathological hidden fear of the opposite sex that was caused by traumatic parent-child relationships. This view was widely influential in the medical profession.<11> In 1956, however, Evelyn Hooker performed a study that compared the happiness and well-adjusted nature of self-identified homosexual men with heterosexual men and found no difference.<12> Her study stunned the medical community and made her a hero to many gay men and lesbians,<13> but homosexuality remained in the DSM until 1973.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots

Here is a list of sociopathic personality characteristics:

http://www.geocities.com/lycium7/psychofacts.html

1. Superficial charm and good intelligence
2. Shallow emotions and lack of empathy, guilt, or remorse
3. Behaviours indicative of little life plan or order
4. Failure to learn from experience and absence of anxiety
5. Unreliability, insincerity, and untruthfulness

Who is going to trust a gay person if the medical community says that homosexuals are all liars who lack empathy or guilt, they never learn and they live for the moment, they can persuade anyone to do anything and they are advocates of chaos? That’s as good definition of the devil as you will ever hear.

Who is the most infamous sociopath?



Imagine living in a world where you are constantly being compared to Charles Manson---or child rapists or embezzlers---because you want to marry John instead of Jane.

V. Stonewall, Or Gays Have Battled Police Brutality In the Streets of America, Too



http://socialistalternative.org/literature/stonewall.html

After centuries of being forced into the closet, burned at the stake, castrated, stripped of employment and told that they were insane, gay people had just about had enough. In the 1960s, when every other oppressed group in the United States decided to stand up for its civil rights, homosexuals decided that they deserved the same rights. In 1969, when NYC police decided to shake down a gay bar in Greenwich Village (just business as usual for New York's finest) the patrons decided to fight back.

Pine ordered his subordinates to retreat into the empty bar, which they proceeded to trash as well as savagely beating a heterosexual folk singer who had the misfortune to pass the doorway at that moment. At the end of the evening, a teenager had lost two fingers from having his hand slammed in a car door. Others received hospital treatment following assaults with police billy clubs. The historian of the riots, Martin Duberman, claims that the police singled out "camp," or "feminine," young men for special treatment.

Snip
People in the crowd started shouting "Gay Power!" And as word spread through Greenwich Village and across the city, hundreds of gay men and lesbians, black, white, Hispanic, and predominantly working class, converged on the Christopher Street area around the Stonewall Inn to join the fray. The police were now reinforced by the Tactical Patrol Force (TPF), a crack riot-control squad which had been specially trained to disperse people protesting against the Vietnam War.

Duberman describes the scene as the two dozen "massively proportioned" TPF riot police advanced down Christopher Street, arms linked in Roman Legion-style wedge formation: "In their path, the rioters slowly retreated, but - contrary to police expectations - did not break and run ... hundreds ... scattered to avoid the billy clubs but then raced around the block, doubled back behind the troopers, and pelted them with debris. When the cops realized that a considerable crowd had simply re-formed to their rear, they flailed out angrily at anyone who came within striking distance.

"But the protestors would not be cowed. The pattern repeated itself several times: The TPF would disperse the jeering mob only to have it re-form behind them, yelling taunts, tossing bottles and bricks, setting fires in trash cans.

Another source describes the reaction that night:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots

We all had a collective feeling like we'd had enough of this kind of shit. It wasn't anything tangible anybody said to anyone else, it was just kind of like everything over the years had come to a head on that one particular night in the one particular place, and it was not an organized demonstration.... Everyone in the crowd felt that we were never going to go back. It was like the last straw. It was time to reclaim something that had always been taken from us.... All kinds of people, all different reasons, but mostly it was total outrage, anger, sorrow, everything combined, and everything just kind of ran its course. It was the police who were doing most of the destruction. We were really trying to get back in and break free. And we felt that we had freedom at last, or freedom to at least show that we demanded freedom. We weren't going to be walking meekly in the night and letting them shove us around—it's like standing your ground for the first time and in a really strong way, and that's what caught the police by surprise. There was something in the air, freedom a long time overdue, and we're going to fight for it. It took different forms, but the bottom line was, we weren't going to go away. And we didn't.

And that, Mike Huckabee, is about as good a description as you will ever hear of what makes people join a civil rights struggle.

[CraftyGal]

1. Great Information!

I watched Huckabee on the View yesterday. Not sure where he is getting his information from.

CraftyGal

[joshuachayne]

2. huckabee's view

I'm hoping that people will at least contact the View and correct the falsehoods that Huckabee promoted on the show.

http://abc.go.com/site/contactus.html

Its up to us to fight the smears, lies, and propaganda. We can't wait for anyone else to do it for us. Hopefully, some of you will join me in reminding them of the historical persecution gays have faced such as those mentioned in this thread.

[Lilith Velkor]

3. Welcome to DU

:hi:

[hvn_nbr_2]

4. Huckabee's been smoking too much brimstone.

That's the answer to "I wonder what Mike Huckabee has been smoking."

[ColbertWatcher]

5. Fuckabee and his willful ignorance is the reason why ...

... there will always be people who are Constitutionally invisible, despite our country being founded on the idea that "all men" are created equal.



BTW, if you haven't seen it yet, there's a trailer for the new movie about Harvey Milk, starring Sean Penn (http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=385&topic_id=242066&mesg_id=242066)

[David Zephyr]

6. Best post at the DU today.

K&R.

[D-Lee]

7. Good info! Now a Huckabee-Palin joint interview would be mind boggling!

How I'd love to see a Huckabee-Palin joint interview/debate.

Really want to see how they line up on gays, evolution, etc. Having them together would really put it all in high relief.

I know it's like picking at a scab but it would be fascinating anyway ...

And, as ever, McCamy Taylor, thanks for another great post.

[Shallah Kali]

8. There is no educating this Huckster. He thinks homosexual = pedophile/necrophile - link

No matter how correct you are and how lucidly you lay out the facts there is no reasoning with people like him. The MSM should be calling him out on it instead of ignoring his radical religious beliefs but like with Palin radicals wearing a veneer of Christianity can do what they want without repercussions no matter what vile putrescence they spew.


Mike Huckabee: Playing Both Sides of the Pulpit

Washington Dispatch: The candidate says he wants to unite the country. But in a 1998 book, Huckabee was a fierce culture warrior, equating environmentalism with pornography, homosexuality with necrophilia, and nonbelievers with evildoers.

http://www.motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2007/12/huckabee-homosexuality-environmentalism-book.html

In the days before this debate, Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, was hit with questions regarding his past remarks and positions on religion (in 1998 he said, "I hope we...take this nation back for Christ"), on AIDS (in 1992 he proposed that people with the disease be quarantined), and on the role of women in society (in 1998 he endorsed an ad affirming the Baptist teaching that a "wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband"). And Huckabee was obviously trying to come across as a friendly and reasonable fundamentalist who eschewed the politics of division. But not too long ago, Huckabee was quite willing to be divisive. In a 1998 book decrying American culture, Huckabee was no seeker of common ground. He drew stark lines, equating environmentalists with pornographers and homosexuality with pedophilia and necrophilia. He also declared that people who do not believe in God tend to be immoral and to engage in "destructive behavior." He drew a rather harsh picture of an American society starkly split between people of faith and those of a secular bent, with the latter being a direct and immediate threat to the nation.

The book, Kids Who Kill: Confronting Our Culture of Violence, was hardly a call to come together. Huckabee wrote it with George Grant in response to the March 24, 1998, school shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas. The book was published in early June of that year, its cover featuring a blurry photograph of a young boy pointing a gun at the reader.

In Kids Who Kill, Huckabee argued that school shootings were the product of a society in decline, a decline marked (and caused) by abortion, pornography, media violence, out-of-wedlock sex, divorce, drug use, and, of course, homosexuality. Huckabee and his coauthor bemoaned the "demoralization of America," observing, "Despite all our prosperity, pomp, and power, the vaunted American experiment in liberty seems to be disintegrating before our very eyes." Huckabee, who was governor at the time and a well-known social conservative, blasted away at those whom he held responsible for America's ills, and he took a rather tough stand against government social programs and their advocates. In lamenting the "cultural conflicts" besetting the country, he wrote,

Abortion, environmentalism, AIDS, pornography, drug abuse, and homosexual activism have fragmented and polarized our communities.

Why was he lumping environmentalism with activities he considered sinful? He did not explain further. A few pages later, Huckabee complained,

It is now difficult to keep track of the vast array of publicly endorsed and institutionally supported aberrations—from homosexuality and pedophilia to sadomasochism and necrophilia.

Huckabee did not say what public endorsement of pedophilia or necrophilia he had in mind. But he did seem to be equating homosexuality with both.

Huckabee Directly Equates Homosexuality With Bestiality
http://tpmelectioncentral.com/2008/01/huckabee_equates_homosexuality_with_bestiality.php


Huckabee connected to Bill Gothard cult (& much more)
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/1/19/192431/131/Diary/Mike_Huckabee_Member_of_destructive_Bill_Gothard_cult

Huckabee: Joel's Army stalking horse?

The more I read about Mike Huckabee, the more that people find in digging up stuff, the more he opens his mouth...he sounds, more and more, like someone who would be the perfect "sergeant-at-arms" for the most extreme wing of the dominionist movement--the "Joel's Army" aka "Joshua Generation" contingent of neopentecostal dominionists.

First it was the call for the US Constitution to be "changed" to be in accordance to "God's law"--and the US de jure converted to the Republic of Gilead, or (more properly, considering Huckabee's theology) a one-nation version of the "Tribulation Force" popularised in the Left Behind novels. (And he could do so; something like 34 states have made calls for a constitutional convention to attempt to pass a "Human Life Amendment" that would ban not only abortion but practically all forms of birth control. According to Article V of the US Constitution, only 27 states need call for this; it is still legally iffy whether a "ConCon" resolution can be revoked or whether it can be limited.)

Then it was finding that Mike Huckabee was explicitly getting not only endorsements but a lot of informal help from Joseph Fuiten--yes, that Fuiten, the same guy who called for mass denationalisation of non-dominionists.

Then it was finding he was a Christian Zionist, a premillenial dispensationalist, and released a rapist-killer from prison despite protests.

Then it was Huckabee literally invoking "God's Army" in a speech in New Hampshire, using words that would have more place in an Assemblies tent meeting.

One of the real puzzlers to me in all this is why he has supported stuff that...even for a dominionist, steeplejacked SBC...seem more distinctly neopente than SBC. Why is he getting so much support from neopentes (even more so than the SBC itself)?

[Bluenorthwest]

9. Thank you

Thanks for answering Huckabee and informing our DU community. You have seriously lifted my day.

[Duncan Grant]

10. Bookmarked!

Evidence. Analysis. Game Over.

Thank you so much for this thread! :yourock:

[RedLetterRev]

11. Bookmarked and Gratefully Received

Some days it feels like we've so many enemies and so few friends. Today, we've got a great-big friend. Thanks McCamy. It means a lot.

[booley]

12. Homophobes say Gays haven't been victims of violence

Meanwhile Racists say other races have not been victims of violence (or downplay the violence)

Bigots always maintain a world of ignorance.