The story sounds like a bad joke: “Two gays and a kid they’re raising run into Donald Trump’s Jewish daughter and her kids as they’re boarding a holiday flight to San Francisco…”
What follows was even too much for the rebarbative Piers Morgan. The men insist on calling each other “husband” and seem to have acquired a child to raise (probably someone I’ll be podcasting about in thirty years if the Rainbow Brigade hasn’t disappeared me like Jimmy Hoffa by 2046). They caused a ruckus by heckling Ivanka Trump in front of her husband, her children, the Secret Service, a full plane of passengers, and the crew.
The crew, unamused, made the admirable choice to eject Dan Goldstein, a Brooklyn attorney, and Matt Lasner, a professor of urban studies and Frasier-style aesthetical critic at Hunter College. Caught in the kerfuffle was the poor babe held in the arms of one of these two charmers. Having interviewed and gotten to know many adults who were raised by gay couples, I can fear this poor child will have to endure a decade and a half of the queer guardians’ rants about politics, rallies on courthouse steps, and lascivious gay pride parades.
Consistent with the passive-aggressive dishonesty of so many social justice warriors, Lasner expected sympathy and tweeted out that he and Mr. Goldstein were being thrown off the plane simply for having expressed their opinion in a calm, gentle tone. This innocent-sounding posture is contradicted by a tweet from only an hour earlier in which Lasner gleefully told the world, “Ivanka and Jared at JFK T5, flying commercial. My husband chasing them down to harass them. #banalityofevil.” The “we were just being polite dissenters” line was also undermined when sleuths found earlier postings from Lasner, in which he photographed a teenage boy wearing a Reagan T-shirt and he called it “hate speech.”
In the predictable firestorm that followed, a mass of people promised to get Lasner fired from Hunter College (a course of action I opposed online, but not with much emotional conviction), and a few suggested that the child be taken away by Child Protective Services (if only the world had listened to us protesters who warned them against gay adoption years ago!) For the record, as a kid who was raised by his mom with the help of her female partner, I cannot say that a child who’s been raised by gays for several years already is automatically better off removed from their home. But I do think the gay guardians need to assure the public that the boy has contact with his biological mother and her kin. And now is a good time to revisit many of the less-discussed reasons for objecting to gay marriage.
L’Affaire JetBlue brings it all together. You have two arrogant homosexuals attacking Ivanka in front of her children and in front of their child, after years of the LGBT lobby’s claims that gay parents aren’t brainwashing child abusers but loving neighbors just like you, who want only the welfare of children before all. Their attack on Ivanka is vague and illogical—she isn’t the politician. The politician they accuse of destroying America, Donald J. Trump, is actually more progressive than Hillary Clinton on LGBT issues in many ways.
Lasner and Goldstein represent the twin pillars of left-wing political correctness: the lawyer and the tenured professor. The American voters rejected the brew of identity politics that became synonymous with Hillary Clinton: a constant list of groups with grievances, endless accusations of hate, threats to destroy people’s careers and social lives if they’re branded as bigots, and a bewildering maze of talking points designed for tenure, peer review and jurisprudence—common sense and actual truth be damned.
The good news is that the reaction to their antics has been swift public disavowal. Even liberals like Piers Morgan do not want to be identified as the people who attack women and children in public to score political points for parties that don’t care about regular people. Many are tired of LGBT issues granting such disproportionate authority to gay men who have no problem behaving hatefully toward women and who would never be considered “oppressed” were it not for expedient rhetoric designed to win elections.
But there’s bad news too. Bashing the Lasners and Goldsteins of the world cannot restore to people like me and Brittany Klein what political correctness already took from us. We fought for children’s rights to a mom and dad. We were attacked, blacklisted, mobbed, and driven out of our jobs in the earliest phases of the liberal putsch, at a time when “antigay” was the most lethal label of all—a label that would make even Fox News, the National Review, and most free-market thinktanks keep such a person at a careful distance.
Some came to help us, but for the most part, the Obama years were a re-enactment of that old Niemoller poem, “First they came for the socialists.” First they came for the homophobes, and folks stayed out of it because they were okay with gay marriage. Then they came for the racists, and folks stayed out of it because they could accept illegal immigration and affirmative action. Then they came for the Islamophobes, and folks stayed out of it because they didn’t want to profile Syrian refugees. Then they came for the climate denialists, and it was hot outside so folks stayed out of it because they couldn’t be sure who was right.
And then they came for everyone with an opinion. And nobody was left.
Merry Christmas anyway!
Robert Oscar Lopez can be followed at English Manif, Soundcloud, or Twitter.