[lit-ideas] A Right-Wing Neocon Gay Liberal

  • From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 10:54:54 -0800

I know, I know.  I'm terribly unreasonable.  It's time for Andreas or
Michael to jump in and tell me I only read right-wing Neocon books.  This
"Right-Wing Neocon" in question is named Bruce Bawer.  He is a gay Liberal
who moved to Europe to get away from Right Wing Christian Fundamentalists.
He was told by European friends that there was no Right-Wing-Religious
problem in Europe.  He discovered that wasn't true:  Now he has something to
rant about.

 

[Page 33] "The main reason I'd been glad to leave America was Protestant
fundamentalism.  But Europe, I eventually saw, was falling prey to an even
more alarming fundamentalism whose leaders made their American Protestant
counterparts look like amateurs.  Falwell was an unsavory creep, but he
didn't issue fatwas.  James Dobson's parenting advice was appalling, but he
wasn't telling people to murder their daughters.  American liberals had been
fighting the Religious Right for decades; Western Europeans had yet to even
acknowledge that they had a Religious Right.  How could they ignore it?
Certainly as a gay man, I couldn't' close my eyes to this grim reality.  Pat
Robertson just wanted to deny me marriage; the imams wanted to drop a wall
on me.  I wasn't fond of the hypocritical conservative-Christian line about
hating the sin and loving the sinner, but it was preferable to the
forthright fundamentalist Muslim view that homosexuals merited death."

 

 

Lawrence

 

  _____  

From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Simon Ward
Sent: Friday, March 10, 2006 10:33 AM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Dutch support killer of van Gogh

 

"How delightful to have two people so quickly jump to the defense of the
Islamists bent upon taking over Europe.   Perhaps Allah is behind them after
all."

 

Actually, my concern was defending the British Welfare State rather than
Islamists since, as it seemed to me, it was the system that Bawer was
attacking. 

 

As for Allah - well I've just taken a look over my shoulder and all I can
see is the silhouette of a oak tree against a topaz sky. 

 

Rant coming....

 

The problem Lawrence is that you are labelling anyone who disagrees with you
(or the authors you quote) as closet Islamists. You have no conception that
there has been any wrongdoing by the forces you support. If I rail against
Bush, then I must be an Islamist - or at a push a raving Leftist. There's no
middle ground is there? 

 

Yet the vast majority of people in the world just want to live their lives.
Whatever religion, whatever creed, they just want to live their lives. But
people like you and Bush won't let them because you, and he, demand that
they take sides. 

 

Still. One day soon I'm going analyse the dates of each Bin Laden Broadcast.


 

Simon

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