Bradley Manning is off limits at SF Gay Pride parade, but corporate sleaze is embrace

[Os Cangaceiros]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/27/bradley-manning-sf-gay-pride


Third, when I wrote several weeks ago (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/26/gay-marriage-supreme-court-defeatism) about the remarkable shift in public opinion on gay equality, I noted that this development is less significant than it seems because the cause of gay equality poses no real threat to elite factions or to how political and economic power in the US are distributed. If anything, it bolsters those power structures because it completely and harmlessly assimilates a previously excluded group into existing institutions and thus incentivizes them to accommodate those institutions and adopt their mindset. This event illustrates exactly what I meant.

Sounds about right. Social equality is a worthy cause for it's own sake I think, but ultimately the gay rights issue doesn't really have a subversive edge anymore IMO

[sixdollarchampagne]

Thanks to Os Cangaceiros (I've always wondered what that means – it's Portuguese, isn't it – but I'm too lazy to look it up) for providing a link to the wonderful article by Glenn Greenwald, where he skewers SF Gay Pride for its despicable decision to capitulate to the government and disassociate itself from the unfortunate and courageous Bradley Manning, who deserves all the solidarity he can get. If the official gay movement ever represented a threat to the bourgeoisie, it sure as hell doesn't now; Greenwald demonstrates that it is merely an echo of the Democratic Party (like most, if not all, of the social movements in the US).

EDIT: According to http://dictionary.reverso.net/portuguese-english/Os%20Cangaceiros/forced, in Brazilian Portuguese, Os Cangaceiros means "the bandits," what a neat screen name! (I have always said that if we get a dog, we should name the animal "Bandit.")

[sixdollarchampagne]

Just one more thing, if I may: Years ago, when I was in the Socialist Party, we organized a small contingent to march in the Boston Gay Pride Parade, which is a huge event. What I did not know at the time was that there is apparently a fee for having a contingent in that parade. So we set out with the banner of our (Socialist) Party, and, very quickly, a Parade official with a clipboard came up and told us that, since we were "unofficial" (i.e., we had not paid the fee for marching as a group), we would have to march at the very end of the parade, "way in the back," she said. Then, a short time after we got kicked out of the parade, the Justice for Mumia contingent marched by, and they sure looked tough, being proletarians from Workers World and all, and they let us march with their contingent, and no Parade official dared say anything about that. So, thanks to the Marcyites, we socialists didn't have to go to the tail end of the Gay Pride Parade after all.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

I was around when Gay rights became a more widely discussed issue on the left in the early 70s. The problem with orienting to the gay lib milieu has always been the lack of a class line -- just as orienting to feminist movements that are not Marxist leads pretty directly to the Democratic Party in the US. A split from the IS in the mid 70s, the Revolutionary Socialist League, made gay rights their signature issue. Now they were a left split and even called themselves "Trotskyists." To be fair, they did not exactly wind up with the Dems -- they just disintegrated sometime in the 80s.

An interesting aside -- there was a revolutionary, primarily gay grouping, called the Red Flag Union, in California in the mid-late 70s. As they were moving towards Trotskyism, the RSL was certain they would fuse with them. It was not to be. The RFU comrades fused with the "anti-gay" Spartacist League in a sharp rejection of sectoralist politics. And the "anti-gay" Spartacist League coopted a number of the leading comrades on the the CC and PB. A very interesting, but unusual grouping.

Bottom line, while it is very important for the Leninist Vanguard to attend to the oppression of minorities, women and gays, the class line must be drawn very clearly in propaganda and approach. Any movement that is built around denying the primacy of class in our current epoch is necessarily reformist at best.

The dropping of Manning is mendacious! Thank you for pointing it out, comrade.

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

Fuck SF Pride. A queer prisoner of conscience is being abused by the state, and SF Pride is on the state's side.