Bullies

by Ben Shapiro

  But they are, of course, because the gay bullies say they should be. Thus President Obama appointed as his “safe schools czar” one Kevin Jennings, former head of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN—emphasis on the Gay and Lesbian, less emphasis on the Straight). At a GLSEN event in conjunction with the Massachusetts Department of Education, held at Tufts University in 2000, Jennings was the keynote speaker. What did he and others speak about? Among other perverse sexual practices, they discussed fisting—the practice of inserting your hand up somebody’s rectum or vagina. Who attended? Two hundred young teens and three hundred adults. Homosexual sex techniques were widely discussed, as were sadomasochistic ones. Jennings never disowned the event. GLSEN is still funded by the state of Massachusetts.60 GLSEN also handed out apparent fisting kits (including plastic gloves and lubricant) to students.61 As for Jennings’s reading list at GLSEN, it included episodes of children playing “sex therapist” with each other and incestuous relationships; GLSEN even sponsored a gay Santa play in 2009.62 When the conservative blogosphere exposed the fact that Jennings once failed to report a high school student having random sexual encounters with a child predator in a public bathroom, the gay bullies promptly labeled them “anti-gay.”63

  As mandatory gay education becomes a larger and larger issue across the country, so does transgenderism. The Department of Justice has given in to the gay bullies, accepting a ruling from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that claims that so-called gender identity discrimination is illegal. So if Jim Bob shows up to the construction site tomorrow in a two-piece bikini and a Cher wig, you’re a bigot if you fire him.64

  If that sounds ridiculous, wait until you hear this one: the DOJ actually forced the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith to allow a fully male transgender student to use the women’s bathrooms on campus. He’d been married twice and had a biological daughter. But he wanted to use the little girls’ room. So the DOJ said he should be able to, even though there are unisex bathrooms on campus. “In the eyes of the law,” said Mark Horn, vice president of university relations, “this individual is entitled to use the bathroom that she identifies with.”65

  The losers of this cultural battle will most certainly be Americans, who are no longer free to keep dudes out of ladies restrooms, or to protect their children from learning about sodomy at age seven.

  CONCLUSION

  With President Obama’s newfound support of gay marriage, his allies in the press decided to launch a concerted offensive against Mitt Romney on the issue. That offensive started the day after Obama’s announcement, in obvious coordination with the Obama campaign, with a Washington Post piece accusing Romney of bullying a gay kid . . . fifty years ago. “John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney [at Cranbrook School], was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality,” wrote Jason Horowitz in the Post. “Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.”66

  As it turned out, there was little or no evidence that Romney had bullied the kid because he was gay. In fact, the kid didn’t come out as gay until later in life to his family. In reality, it was far more likely that Romney had been empowered by the administration to enforce the dress code, which likely banned long hair (remember, this was 1965). The family of the supposedly bullied kid said the story was “factually incorrect and we are aggrieved that he would be used to further a political agenda.”67 And the Post story itself was greatly exaggerated—one of the supposed witnesses to the story was quoted as saying that he was “long bothered” by the incident, but told the press that he hadn’t even remembered the incident.68

  But the damage was done. Romney was anti-gay, a bigot; Obama was pro-gay, a haloed angel (he was actually portrayed that way on the cover of Time). Former CNBC host Donny Deutsch appeared on The Tonight Show, where he explained that Romney was “the guy beating up the weaker kid growing up. . . . I think that’s really going to hurt him.”69 Never mind that Obama admitted in his own autobiography to bullying a girl: “I ran up to Coretta [a little black girl] and gave her a slight shove; she staggered back and looked up at me, but still said nothing. ‘Leave me alone!’ I shouted again. And suddenly Coretta was running, faster and faster, until she disappeared from sight.”70 All that mattered was that Romney had to be portrayed as a thug. As Dr. Peggy Drexler, an Obama sycophant, put it at Huffington Post, “So to a generation of current and future voters, Obama has deftly offered a choice: a respectful and inclusive voice of the future; versus a schoolyard tormenter aligned with the intolerant voices of the past.”71

  So, who’s the real bully here? The guy slandered with he-said, she-said experiences from five decades ago? Or the guy slandering that guy by using his lackeys in the press to push out half-century-old smears?

  The answer’s obvious. The real bully here wasn’t Mitt Romney—who, by all accounts, treats gays and lesbians with immense respect—but Barack Obama and his allies in the press.

  But that’s how the left works its magic.

  Feminists bully both men and women who disagree with them while simultaneously claiming to be victimized by the patriarchal structure. Radicals like Andrea Dworkin maliciously state that “right-wing women agitate for their own subordination”—they’re sellouts. And they seek to change society to reflect their nonscientific view of the world, in which men and women are precisely the same—except for the ding-dongs and vajingoes, of course. If reality doesn’t comply with their vision of the universe, society must change to accommodate them. Men must be trained to stop acting like men; women must be cowed into submission, or forced to comply with feminist demands.

  The same holds true for the gay bullies. Not only are traditional marriage advocates supposed to sit down and shut up, but gays who dare defy them are rhetorically beaten to death. Says Michael Musto, columnist for the Village Voice, the gays of GOProud, the Republican gay group, are “like Jewish Nazis! Black Klan members! Women who campaign for Rush Limbaugh. Mexican Republicans! Roaches who moonlight as exterminators!”72 Joe Jervis, a gay blogger who refers to GOProud as “kapo bootlickers”—a reference to Jews who helped the Nazis during World War II—has received awards from GLAAD.73 And Dan Savage, whose mouth also doubles as a biological weapon of mass destruction, calls gays who disagree with him “house faggots” who “grab their ankles.”74 It is considered a mortal sin in the gay community not to comply with their thug tactics.

  Of course, if a gay Republican decides not to come out, for fear of being bullied, the gay bullies simply bully him or her anyway. They out him.

  Now, gay bullies never out leftists. That would be inconsiderate. After all, leftists don’t deserve to be bullied, since they agree with the militant gay agenda first and foremost.

  But right-wing gays? They must be outed and destroyed.

  Now, this should violate gays’ basic sense of morality. That morality is based on two notions: consent and privacy. And the gay bullies have to violate both essential principles in order to accomplish their goals.

  Fortunately, the morality of the gay bullies is quite malleable, so they have no problem with that.

  The chief architect of the outing phenomenon is Michelangelo Signorile. Signorile founded the magazine Outweek; his preferred strategy was targeting those who in any way disagreed with them, then making their sex lives public. Randy Shilts, a gay man who wrote for the Advocate and the San Francisco Chronicle and penned the massive bestseller And the Band Played On, thought outing was abominable. As he wrote, “No matter how high-sounding the rhetoric, outing makes some of the most august gay journalists and leaders look like a lot of bitchy queens on the set of Boys in the Band, bent not on helping each other but on clawing each other. It’s not a pretty sight. As for the nastiness of outing, whether outing is done to Army privates by Pentagon policy or to prominent officials by the gay press, it’s still a dirty business that hurts people.” Shilts rightly called outers �
��lavender fascists” and compared them to “a third-grader stomping his foot and yelling, ‘Do what I want you to or I’ll tell on you!’ ” Signorile responded in typical Alinsky fashion: Shilts’s remarks, he said, “reeked of self-loathing.”75 He wasn’t a true gay man, because he was against fascist tactics like outing.

  Gay bullying works. Even Shilts eventually backed down and decided that “selective outing” was fine. Shilts backed this new consensus in a piece he wrote in 1990 for the New York Times. Politicians who “engaged in rabidly anti-gay politicking” should be outed, he wrote, because “the politicians themselves would have already asserted that homosexuality was an issue that demanded intense public scrutiny.”76 If someone opposes the gay rights movement, that doesn’t mean he’s suggesting that homosexuality itself demands intense public scrutiny, of course. Far from it. But gay bullying needs no logic. It just needs hatred and rage to motivate it.

  The sex bullies have taken over the social sphere. Now you’re considered intolerant if you simply want to protect the innocence of a child in the classroom, or think that you ought to be able to teach your kids about the advantages of traditional marriage, or believe that men and women are different from each other. You must be cured of your thought crimes. And the sex bullies are there, bullhorns in hand, ready to apply that cure at a moment’s notice.

  6.

  GREEN BULLIES

  Meet Mike and Chantell Sackett. The couple decided to buy a $25,000 parcel of land, approximately 0.63 acres, near scenic Priest Lake in northern Idaho. Priest Lake is surrounded by a beautiful greenery; its wildlife includes bear, deer, and moose. It also has terrific trout fishing. It’s a tourist hot spot.

  In 2007, Mike and Chantell decided to build on their land. This wasn’t rare—their own tract was separated from the lake by several large man-made structures. So they did what people do when building: they brought in dirt and rock, and filled in part of the lot to create a foundation for their dream home.

  A few months later, they opened their mail to find a letter from the friendly neighborhood U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). To the Sacketts’ surprise, they were informed that the property “contains wetlands . . . adjacent to Priest Lake.” Further, they were told that they had caused “fill material to enter waters of the United States” and had therefore polluted under the Clean Water Act (CWA). Never mind that their land contained no water.1

  Not only were the Sacketts barred from building on their own land, the EPA said; they also had to “repair” the land they had damaged. It would cost them $27,000 to do so—more than they’d paid for the tract in the first place.2 The EPA also threatened millions of dollars in fines—up to $75,000 per day for failure to comply. That’s $9 million per year. Because you never know when fish will need to spawn in the middle of dry land—and you never know when they’ll need a Scrooge McDuck money vault to swim in.

  So the Sacketts asked for a hearing on the issue.

  And the EPA denied it.

  So the Sacketts sued. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which sided with the Sacketts. As Justice Samuel Alito wrote, concurring with the opinion of the Court, “The position taken in this case by the Federal Government—a position that the Court now squarely rejects—would have put the property rights of ordinary Americans entirely at the mercy of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employees.” This, in short, was bullying.

  What made the bullying worse, Alito noted, was the fact that the CWA is “notoriously unclear. Any piece of land that is wet at least part of the year is in danger of being classified by EPA employees as wetlands covered by the Act, and according to the Federal Government, if property owners begin to construct a home on a lot that the agency thinks possesses the requisite wetness, the property owners are at the agency’s mercy.”3

  It was a victory for Americans, who could challenge the EPA’s hegemony now—they’d have a way to yell and scream if the EPA suddenly designated the puddle near their broken garden hose a “wetland.” But the case didn’t stop the growth of the EPA. The agency, which sprang full-formed into being in 1970, was never fully approved by Congress—but it started with a budget in excess of $1 billion (about $6 billion in terms of today’s purchasing power) and well over 4,000 employees. All that just to ensure that Americans didn’t befoul Gaia.

  Today, the EPA has a budget of $8.3 billion and a working staff of more than 17,000. The earth is the same as it was then. Same dirt. Same trees. Same rocks. In fact, the environment is cleaner than it was in 1970. Government is the only organization in which you solve a problem, then put more people on the problem in order to solve it even better.

  And these regulators know that idle hands were the capitalistic devil’s playground. So they began regulating. And regulating. And regulating. Within the first few years of its existence, the EPA was placing 1,500 rules in the Federal Register. Annually.4

  And now, President Obama wants to use the EPA to regulate climate change. After all, this is the president who said in 2008, upon winning the Democratic nomination, that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”5 This is the president who campaigned in 2011 on the notion that Republicans wanted “dirtier air, dirtier water.”6 This is the “green energy” president who handed billions in subsidies to idiotic green boondoggles, and who insisted that green cars like the Chevy Volt would drive the American economy back to the top of the world stage. Sadly, the Chevy Volt’s engine burst into flame on the way up that hill. America’s economic future was burned alive.

  Nobody wants dirty air and dirty water. Nobody wants to live in an old British industrial town where everybody’s dying of the black lung, Zoolander-style. But by the same token, most Americans like the notion of working for a living. They like being able to buy nice things. They like being able to afford air-conditioning—and they like being able to use air-conditioning without express written consent from the government. Americans like to build houses near lakes, especially when they’re not killing endangered duck-billed platypuses to do it.

  Americans like balance. We’re conservationists. Teddy Roosevelt recognized the balance we wanted to establish between economic growth and a pristine natural environment. He especially advocated carving out particular areas in which natural beauty would be left to its own devices. But he wasn’t for cutting off American industry.

  Today’s environmentalists are obsessed with cutting off American industry. They set America’s economic growth in stark contrast to environmental stewardship, as though every time a cash register rings, an endangered woodpecker loses its wings. They are Luddites who oppose economic progress, and who generally seek wealth redistribution. Many of them are watermelon environmentalists: green on the outside, red on the inside.

  Others, like President Obama, lie. They pretend that spending taxpayer cash on windmill farms that make landscapes ugly and chop birds into delicious puree is a wonderful idea, and creates jobs. They suggest that new auto emissions standards, written and applied unilaterally by executive branch agencies, somehow stimulate the economy. It’s a lie, and it’s a waste of taxpayer resources.

  When those policies fail, the environmental bullies turn from business to individual citizens. They make Americans feel guilty for enjoying climate-controlled bedrooms and liking luxury vehicles. Instead, we’re supposed to act morally enlightened only if we drive a Prius. Sure, there may be a dead priest in the trunk. But at least we’re cutting down on our carbon footprint.

  For these environmentalists, worship of the environment is like any other religion: if you abide by the antihuman code, sacrificing your own wants and needs to those of the dandelions, you’re a better person by definition. A study from the journal Social Psychological & Personality Science says that people who are exposed to organic foods immediately become jerks. Seriously. People shown comfort foods like cookies volunteered to spend more time to help strangers; people who were shown pictures of organic vegetables were more judg
mental. “There’s something about being exposed to organic food that made them feel better about themselves,” said one of the scientists. “And that made them kind of jerks a little bit, I guess.”7

  Hence Michelle Obama, The Most Beautiful Woman In The World™.

  But the Jerk Effect is not limited to organic food. Another study shows that people who buy so-called green products don’t share money with others; cheat more often; and lie more easily.8 These holier-than-thou cretins think that because their apples aren’t spiked with hormones, they get to steal from the rest of us. Which is probably why they’re Democrats.

  And they get to lecture us at the same time. According to one survey, the number-one reason people buy the hideous and expensive Toyota Prius is that “it makes a statement about me.” Overall, 57 percent of Prius owners attributed their love of dumb cars that accelerate from 0 to 60 in eight years to wanting people to know they care about the environment. They’re special!9 In the words of New Yorker columnist and Prius owner Bruce McCall, “As morally superior citizens of planet Earth, we Prius owners consider it our duty to keep finding new ways to enlighten those eco-heathens who are still floundering in the eco-darkness, even as our cars sometimes fail to decelerate when the brake pedal is depressed, a violation of Newton’s third law of motion, caused by global warming.”10

  Environmentalists are so much better than the rest of us that they can tell us what to do while ignoring their own restrictions. Al Gore can fly around in his super-giant jet airplane while telling us that we’re wasting gas for driving our old Honda. Barbra Streisand can complain about our environmental impact while trying to block off public beaches for her own use. That’s because these are good people. Even if they do occasionally ask masseuses to touch their fifth chakras.