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Gay Issues, 6 September 2007

Memo to James Kerchick: YOU ARE DUMB. And yes, that's intolerant. And no, I don't give a fuck.

One of the long-standing canards of right-wing assholes is that the left is hypocritically intolerant. The argument goes something like this. Some people on the left have called some people on the right "intolerant". Therefore, everybody on the left must be tolerant of everything, or they are being intolerant, and since they've levied that claim against conservatives, they are therefore hypocrites.

Frankly, if conservatives can feel free to completely ignore logical inconsistencies that actually exist, I think liberals should reserve the right to completely ignore logical inconsistencies that can only exist within a superstructure of willful misunderstanding. But since that would make this a very short column, allow me to explain it to any dense motherfuckers that might be wandering through.

Liberals are intolerant. They're just not hypocritical about it. The word "intolerant" is shorthand for a specific set of attitudes - not just the intolerance itself, but the target of that intolerance. It contains within it historical and political connotations. You know, the same way "met the benchmark" doesn't actually mean "met a benchmark", but rather a complicated process by which the observer can position himself in such a way that it sort of looks like the benchmark has almost been met.

Today's specific example is James Kerchick, who wrote an article in the Boston Globe magazine about a month ago chastising the entire vast majority of liberal gays for being intolerant of conservative gays, like him. He based this, I shit you not, over the fact that he got dumped. By a liberal. Who used the excuse "I can’t date someone with a different belief system." Which is probably an excuse for Can't Fucking Stand Being Around You One More Second, but we'll take the guy at face value, because it leads to the following genius argument from Kerchick. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"But with him, as with other liberals I know, tolerance does not always extend to appreciating someone else’s differing political views. Now living in Cambridge and having grown up in the suburbs of Boston and gone to school at Yale, I’ve been surrounded by liberals for nearly all of my life. Most would be astonished to hear that they’re the most intolerant people I’ve ever met. After all, I, the supposedly closed-minded conservative, never considered this guy’s liberal politics anathema to the point of wanting to call off our relationship."

Liberals have never said you have to tolerate everything. We just say you have to tolerate things that don't personally affect you. Like two guys holding hands. Or skin color. Or whether Video Game X lets you shoot dudes in the nuts. Which is about as far away from Kerchick's relationship situation as it gets.

Conservative politics directly and negatively affect homosexuals. This is an incontestable fact. Which is what makes gay conservatives such insufferable dickheads - they have to ignore that incontestable fact in order to maintain their political view. Conversely, liberal gay politics are not threatening to gay Republicans, except to the extent that they point out how blind and stupid gay Republicans are, which at worst might make them stop being Republican.

And that right there is why Kerchick's manmate couldn't handle his being a conservative, while Kerchick can snidely hold himself up as a master of open-mindedness. If you're standing on a porch, and the guy next to is standing on a two-story roof, it's not "equal" if you both jump off. Recognizing the gravity of the situation, as it were, is not intolerance. It's self-preservation.

The rest of the article isn't particularly descript, but there is one bit that would show a shocking lack of self-awareness if it didn't come from a gay conservative, for whom said lack is a requirement. After spending paragraph after paragraph complaining about liberal intolerance and his own moral superiority, Kerchick somehow manages to drop, with a straight face, the following:

"Yet there’s a common, unattractive feature that many conservative gay men share: a serious chip on their shoulder. Being part of a community that is so intolerant of their views, gay conservatives can be embittered, patronizing, and castigatory of their gay brothers. It’s not a particularly attractive attitude."

I'd have dumped the stupid son of a bitch too. Not because I'm a liberal and he's a conservative. It'd just be exhausting having to include the words "pot", "kettle", and "black" in every single sentence for the rest of my life.