When Grievance Groups Collide
Something happens when you abandon equality, as the Left has done in sorting people into grievance groups and making everything about an oppressor-oppressed duality. The ideal eventually runs smack dab into reality, and that means you have to make a decision.
Making decisions, as Richard Masur informed a young Judge Reinhold in 1995's Head Office, is perilous.
When you have the sorts of oppression the Left butters its bread with, as in straight white guy vs anyone else, the decision is baked in. But, when you have conflicts between groups that you've anointed as oppressed, you have to choose which group is more oppressed, and therefore more deserving of your white-knight advocacy.
The Left created "intersectionality" as a means of sorting that out. If you belong to two grievance groups, you get ranked higher than those who belong to just one. Tag yourself with three or four, and you climb to the top of the heap.
This helps the white knights and rainbow warriors avoid decisions, but it doesn't get them all the way to a decision-free mecca.
Back in 2016, in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, I penned this bit about the post-hoc revelation as to which group ranked higher.
It was rather predictable that the Orlando shooting would devolve into an effort to further strip citizens of their rights. The Left wants gun rights infringed in various fashions, the Right wants more power granted to law enforcement, both sides want to curtail 4th Amendment protections and defenestrate due process. No surprise there – rights infringement packaged as “safety” (even though the Orlando shooter had been vetted twice each by both the FBI and the security company he worked for) make good sound bite and sell to easily-agitated voter groups.
The surprise, or perhaps not so much surprise as moment of clarity, came out of the collision of two favored identity groups: gays and muslims.
I’ve written in the past about the grievance hierarchy and how political correctness has turned the concept of equality on its head and fostered a battle for supremacy among constituencies. The Left’s response to the Orlando shooting, in particular its semantic contortions to avoid any association of a shooter that loudly proclaimed his allegiance to Islam and ISIS with Islam, tells us that it is prioritizing Islam over the LGBTQ community and that community’s concerns.
We shouldn’t be surprised. After all, we’ve recently witnessed how some musicians cancelled performances in North Carolina in order to protest that state’s new laws regarding public restroom use by the transgendered, but have either performed in Muslim countries that punish homosexuality with imprisonment or worse, or are affiliated with corporations that do business in those countries. That bit of hypocrisy hasn’t gone unnoticed.
So, in the grievance hierarchy, we now know that Islam ranks higher than homosexuality. Oddly, though, homosexual Muslims don’t seem to get much play, despite their being among the most oppressed people in the world. Perhaps the dissonance is too overwhelming for the social justice warriors to resolve.
What to make of this? Why would the Left opt to ignore the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room?
It’s easy to understand why they try to paint millions of law abiding gun owners as complicit in the murderous act of an evil person – they hate guns, they hate non-liberals, and in matters of politics they have repeatedly demonstrated enough moral flexibility to never let a crisis go to waste and to embrace ends-justify-the-means dishonesty.
It’s a bit less obvious why this attack, reeking of a hatred for homosexuals taught by a radicalized religion that also preaches violence, is being heavily Lysoled. I see a couple possibilities.
First – a presumption that gays are so inextricably aligned with the Left that this abandonment doesn’t cost the Left politically. This is what happens when a constituency’s vote is not in play, when one party knows that people of a certain demographic will vote for its candidates no matter what.
Second – reflexive contrarianism. The Left knows that there is a major anti-muslim sentiment on the Right, as evinced by Trump’s success in making outlandish (and probably unenforceable and probably unconstitutional) declarations about banning muslims from immigrating and about surveilling mosques. So, perhaps, in binary contrarian fashion, they bounce to the other extreme instead of donning the mantle of rationality.
Third – fear. It is a fact that Islamic fanatics have murdered those who they consider especially offensive. Fatwas have been issued that call for the murder of certain Western writers and politicians, the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were attacked and 11 people were killed as retribution for satirical portrayals of Mohammed, and, of course, we have as examples the recent “home grown” terrorist attacks in Orlando and San Bernadino. Radical Islam has made it clear that insults to the religion will not be tolerate. It is ironic, of course, to think that the people insisting there’s nothing to fear from Islamists are deterred from speaking the plain truth about Orlando due to fear of Islamists.
There may be elements of all these, and there may also be the alternate-universe idea that President Obama suggested when he got twisted over criticisms regarding his refusal to use the words “radical Islam,” that is, that naming the aforementioned eight hundred pound gorilla would alienate the moderate muslim community and hamper counterterrorism efforts. Well, gee, whiz, perhaps the moderate muslim community should be on the stage with the president and denounce that which is being done in their religion’s name. This isn’t a Harry Potter story, this is a real problem in the real world, and it’s pretty bizarre to claim to be addressing something that one won’t name.
The reasons are secondary to the fact itself. It’s useful information, and people who lean left but are suspicious of radical Islam should be aware that the opinion makers among them have decided something they may disagree with. They should also take note of the history that suggests that, if the Orlando shooter were a Christian, the Left’s opinion makers would be tripping all over themselves to lay the blame on the entirety of Christianity. Heck, they tried to do that even though the Orlando shooter was obviously and overtly not-Christian.
What’s that old bit? If it were a movie, no one would believe it. Or, if you prefer, you can’t make this shit up.
Against all logic, Muslims trumped gays.
The 10/7 massacre affirmed for us that, as far as the Left is concerned, Muslims also trump Jews. Again, against all logic. Islam's not exactly a progressive religion, and its societies aren't exactly tolerant. Yes, there are tolerant, Westernized Muslim cultures, to be found in the Balkans, in Turkey (though Erdogan is regressing his nation), in northwestern Africa, and Indonesia, but the Left doesn't draw a distinction in its advocacy, and neither the Orlando shooter nor the thousands of Hamas terrorists stand anywhere close to the word "tolerance."
That the Left elevates a culture/religion that outlaws and sometimes kills gays, that treats women as second class citizens or as property, that suppresses free speech and free expression, that has killed women for the sin of exposing their hair in public, and that embraces, unequivocally and enthusiastically, the genocide of Jews is stupefying, yet there it is.
I've spilled much digital ink as to why, but once we pick our jaws up off the floor, we can move on to other grievance clashes. The trans-activist movement, in particular, has made things uncomfortable for the wokerati. In forcing women to compete against biological men, in medically or surgically transitioning children, in putting "people with penises" in women's prisons, in undermining gay and lesbian identities, and more, it has forced a choice - support the trans-activist agenda, or support women and same-sex-attracted individuals.
This is what happens when you abandon equality, when you stop treating persons as individuals. When you presume that someone’s skin color or chromosomes or bits or sexual orientation or ethnicity or religious belief is a presumptive positive or negative when comparing to other people. Or, more accurately, other groups.
And this is why I remain steadfastly libertarian. The only way forward to a society of greater harmony and human progress is by looking at and treating people as individuals. We can recognize a person’s race or gender or orientation or ethnicity or what have you, but those should just be points of interest, not determinative elements.
It’s also why I default to siding with persons, cultures, and societies that are friendlier to equality and to individuals’ self-determination. While Israel is not without fault, she treats women, gays, and, yes, Palestinian muslims a whole lot better than any of her neighbors.
Very well said.