'Heterosexual Pride Day’ declared, decried on social media Some seem to want a straight equivalent to Gay Pride but others complain the idea “must have been created by the kid that cries when he doesn’t get a present during someone else’s birthday party.”
The mass shooting at Orlando’s LGBT nightclub Pulse, which left at least 50 dead, is only the latest chapter in a long history of violence at LGBTQ bars and clubs in America. In fact, for as long as LGBTQ people have been congregating in their own social spaces, these spaces have been the target of vicious homophobic and transphobic violence.
Until the Pulse massacre, the most notorious act of violence against a gay bar was the burning of the UpStairs Lounge, a New Orleans gay bar, in 1973. An arsonist set fire to the bar, killing 32 people in less than 20 minutes. The vast majority of politicians declined to comment on the arson, and the Catholic Archbishop of New Orleans did not offer support to the victims. (The Archdiocese apologized for its silence in 2013.) Many news outlets ignored the story; some of those that did cover it mocked the victims for being gay. No one has ever been prosecuted for the crime. When asked about identifying the victims, the chief detective of the New Orleans Police Department responded, “We don’t even know these papers belonged to the people we found them on. Some thieves hung out there, and you know this was a queer bar.”
In 1997, “Olympic Park Bomber” Eric Robert Rudolph bombed the Otherside Lounge, a lesbian nightclub in Atlanta, later explaining that he believed “the concerted effort to legitimize the practice of homosexuality” was an “assault upon the integrity of American society.” He described homosexuality as “an aberrant sexual behavior,” and wrote that “when the attempt is made” to “recognize this behavior as being just as legitimate and normal as the natural man/woman relationship, every effort should be made, including force if necessary, to halt this effort.” In his confession, Rudolph railed against the “homosexual agenda,” including “gay marriage, homosexual adoption, hate-crime laws including gays, or the attempt to introduce a homosexual normalizing curriculum into our schools.” (...)
The announcement yesterday that Doritos will soon release rainbow-colored chips to support the It Gets Better Project, which works towards preventing anti-LGBT bullying, naturally drew the ire of conservative pundits like John Nolte of Breitbart, who said that Doritos is flying the “colors of anti-Christian hate and oppression.”
But Nolte’s protests pale in comparison to a column in the right-wing American Thinker by Ed Straker, which could be confused for parody.
Straker writes that the new chips are “the perfect gateway snack to introduce children to the joys of homosexuality,” lamenting that nowadays “it’s perceived to be cool to push a specific sexual orientation on children.”
Calling for a boycott of Doritos and all products from its parent company, Pepsi, Straker urges conservatives to “push other companies to launch pro-heterosexual campaigns” by, for example, persuading “a hot dog maker and a hot dog bun company to do a joint effort promoting man-woman relationships.” (...)
Oh well, they can always move to Saudi Arabia, Russia or Northern Ireland. No prizes for guessing which part of the UK is the most religiously fervent.
They don't need no Common Core, neither.
