On "gay bullying" and that thing called "projection."

Kathy Shaidle catches an interesting insight into homosexual ethicist Dan Savage's recent public pronouncement on Michelle Bachman, or, more specifically, Michelle Bachman's husband, from Slate Magazine:

This week, though, the [Dan Savage] podcast started with an attack on Marcus Bachmann’s masculinity. After a short preamble about the accuracy of gaydar (with a scientific citation, no less), Savage—whom I respect tremendously—played a tape of Michelle’s husband’s speaking voice. Bachmann has a tiny bit of a lisp—though it’s barely perceptible—and he slurs his words slightly. To Savage’s ears, it was a gay accent. Savage played the tape over and over, and reprised it several times throughout the podcast. He even did his own Bachmann impression, exaggerating the lisp and camping it up.

In other words, the man who launched the “It Gets Better Project,” an effort to stop the bullying of gay teens, was acting like a big bully.

As Savage always notes, the kind of smear-the-queer taunts that can cause so much pain to young people aren’t aimed only at kids who are gay, they’re often aimed at boys who don’t live up to some mythical standard of masculinity and girls who just aren’t girly enough.

I can only imagine how listeners who happen to have the kind of lisping, effeminate speech and affect that Savage was ridiculing felt upon hearing the attack.

Mark Shea adds this insight about Dan Savage's recent "joke" about raping a male conservative politician:

Don't believe it? Here is Savage, fresh from bullying Bachmann's husband about his lisp, fantasizing about inflicting rape (pardon me: "hate sex" which is totally different) on his political enemies to the applause of the sort of apes who populate the audience of "Real Time".


This is a militant crusading intolerant and deeply hypocritical faith that does not hesitate for a second to deploy against its perceived enemies everything it pretends to decry. Hate sex Rape is openly bruited and applauded. The most miserable schoolyard bullying is just part of the toolkit for these phony apostles of compassion. These guys are going to wear out their welcome damn fast once they use the force of law to try to hammer people into Goodthink. You can't beat people into loving your perversion.

Of course, Maher's audience laughed at the idea of raping someone they hated for having the wrong opinions.

I've been reading Timothy Snyder recite in his excellent book on the tragic situation of people living between Stalin and Hitler, Bloodlands, stories about how Nazis einsatzgruppen in Nazi-occupied Ukraine would drink and laugh and make Jewish women recite "I am a Jew and I don't deserve to live" before forcing them to strip and shooting them in the back of the head and tossing their bodies into a pit that their husbands and brothers had been forced to dig the day before with the taunts that they should dig carefully because their wives and mothers and sisters would be filling up the pit the next day. 

You read those stories and you wonder how any human being could possibly be that way.

There's more than a little bit of that old fashioned Nazi spirit in Maher's audience.