Alex Pareene has a great column up at Salon about the goings on in Wisconsin, and the right wing pout-rage over a woman who, yes, got shoved by a union guy, in a provoked confrontation. Of course, as the video shows, the woman wasn’t really attacked. The guy seemed to be trying to shove the camera away from his face and the wingnut woman got shoved in the process. Granted, that is not nice, and should not happen. But, as they always do, wingnuts from sea to shining sea are howling about what victims they are now. This is not the “QOTD” part referenced in the post title, but it’s a little background:
Let me be clear: I abhor shoving of any kind. Shoving is never justified. The world would be a better place if there was no shoving, by anyone. Make loves, not shoves. But — and I could be wrong here — the gentleman’s actions seem to be aimed at the lens of the video camera, and not intended to cause harm to the person holding it. Pushing a camera away from one’s face seems less “thuggish” to me than it does … defensive. And purposefully picking fights with people in order to provoke an angry response does not really prove much of anything.
None of that matters, of course. What matters is that everyone on the right was simply waiting for one of their content suppliers to produce the requisite “violence from a union thug” video, and here it is. The scripts were all written in advance. Now everyone has jumped on the story.
[…]
Because these people are completely f**king shameless, the woman from the video has compared herself to Lara Logan.
Let me jump in real fast to note that these people are not only shameless about lying and crying victim, but this also shows the inherent misogyny of the conservative movement, in that the woman would compare getting shoved in an altercation she had a hand in provoking with a brutal sexual assault.
Here’s the QOTD part, and I’ll explain why this is relevant to us afterward, if it isn’t obvious already:
This is the height of the conservative movement’s pathological projection: Whatever they are accused of being or doing, the LEFT is the TRULY GUILTY PARTY. (This is the “liberals are the REAL racists” line, which is more of a comforting mantra than a compelling argument.) And now we’ve reached the point in that delusion where, if something bad happens to a leftist (and any member of the MSM is a default socialist), even if no one anywhere said it had anything to do with conservatives, it has to be demonstrated that the left does it too, and does it worse, and that conservatives are the true victims.
Sound familiar? It should!
Every time gay kids get bullied to the point that they take their own lives, wingnuts like Matt Barber and Peter LaBarbera step into bitch and moan that “homosexuals are the real haters!” because we make fun of them and call them names like “Porno Pete.” Just yesterday, Porno Pete tweeted me [the poor thing wants attention], saying “Here’s some real hate – Dan Savage’s vile ‘Santorum [DOT] com’ — wonder if @splcenter frauds will list it as a ‘hate site.'” No, of course they won’t. Dan Savage started that little website for Rick Santorum in response to Santorum‘s own prurient obsession with gay sex and his demonization of an entire class of humans. Santorum is one moronic politician, and he’s a public figure. The site is what is known as “creative activism,” and it’s also hilarious. It does not demonize an entire group of people, and it’s not dishonest; these are two of the SPLC’s primary criteria for classifying groups as “hate groups,” and every Religious Right organization on the list is known for its rank demonization of LGBT people and its pathological dishonesty.
It’s useful to realize, especially when we’re dealing with issues of left vs. right, that these behaviors are exhibited by the Right, no matter what the issue is. There has been incident after incident of right wing violence over the past several years, and every single time, the flying monkeys of the Right scream about how The Left Does It Too! Guys? There hasn’t been a pattern of left-wing violence in this country since the 1960’s or so. That’s how far back we have to reach.
We also see it, ad nauseam, in the Religious Right’s constant repetition of three or four stories of supposed “Christian victimization” by gays — like the time the New Mexico photographer had to abide by the laws of her state, or the time that the New Jersey Methodists who operated a pavilion open to the public had to abide by the laws of their state, or the time a professional rabble-rouser feted by the Religious Right as a “frail, innocent old lady” got her styrofoam cross stomped on when she willingly entered into a mob of protesting gay people, angry that their rights had been taken away in California, etc. None of these incidents resulted in dead bodies or even injury, and the common denominator in most of them is that some Fundamentalist crackpot seemed to believe that their transmogrified understanding of Christianity should trump their obligation to abide by the law in a secular society. But we’ll keep hearing it! The Gays Are The Real Haters!
Hell, just yesterday, Pat Buchanan whined that Obama had “capitulated to militant gays” on DOMA. Oh yes, we are so militant, as we demand to be treated as equal citizens.
Why do they do this? I think there are a lot of reasons, but one is that I believe that many wingnuts, deep down, know full well, that they’re on the wrong side of all of these issues. On the gay front, it’s pretty much an accepted fact that hateful, anti-gay, religious rhetoric is not only conducive, but necessary, to create such a climate that in many corners of this country, it’s still okay to bully and abuse LGBT kids. The fact that they’re still trying to explain away Matthew Shepard’s murder as a drug deal gone bad is just more evidence of this. The fact that they have the unmitigated gall to oppose anti-bullying programs in the aftermath of a spate of gay kids committing suicide after being bullied, all in service of their opposition to the “homosexual agenda,” is evidence of their full-blown denial. And the pathology came full circle when Linda Harvey blamed the suicides on the “gay agenda.”
The left does it too! The liberals are the Real Racists! The gays are the Real Haters! It’s their fault, not ours! Please, please, please, let us find a way to wash all this blood off our hands, so that we may sleep at night!
And so on. It’s helpful to understand the specific fights we engage in with conservatives in context with the rest of their movement. It’s not just about gay people, or unions, or women’s reproductive rights, or the poor, or Muslims, or blacks, or anything else. It’s about all of these things, of course, but it’s mostly about propping themselves up as the Real Americans, which requires anyone who doesn’t conform to be demonized as “other,” while absolving themselves of any responsibility for the havoc they wreak on our society.
[h/t Alex Balk @ The Awl]
