Demagogue

Guess who is being published in Washington, DC's GLBT community paper?

None other than Jeff-freaking-Gannon. C'mon, Washington Blade you can find much better people to write in your paper than Jeff "James Guckert" Gannon. Sheesh. The man is a pseudo-journalist who was caught in a scandal that should have prevented him from ever working anywhere near a newsroom and you decide to publish him? Why?

To make things more nauseating, what does Jeff write about? "Pro-Choice to Abort Gays?" is a less-than-original straw man diatribe that unsubtly argues that GLBT people shouldn't support reproductive rights because of the remote possibility that someday there is an identifiable "gay gene" and that pregnant women will screen for it and subsequently abort.

At present, gay men and lesbians line up strongly behind a woman’s right to an abortion, albeit under a less sinister banner of “freedom of choice.”

How might that position change if parents were able to decide to terminate a pregnancy because of the presence of a genetic predisposition to homosexual behavior?

It would be folly to think that most prospective parents would be willing to bring a pregnancy to term knowing the child would be born gay. The issue is far less prickly for those opposed to abortion and homosexuality, since the identification of a gay gene would probably be quickly followed by a therapy to eradicate it as if it were a genetic defect.

Despite growing tolerance of homosexuals in American culture, it is questionable whether many parents would want that lifestyle for their children.

First of all, never in my life have I ever heard or read a GLBT person refer to being gay as a "lifestyle." The only people who call it a "lifestyle" are people who generally don't like us. Apparently Gannon has been hanging out with too many 'phobes for too long, you know, people like himself. Reason #57 Guckert/Gannon doesn't deserve to be published in a GLBT newspaper is that back when leading a double life as a gay escort and closeted, fake White House reporter he wrote anti-gay comments for his psuedo-newspaper.

The thing is we already know that Gannon is an anti-choice right-winger and could give a flying fig about the majority of the GLBT community who are liberal democrats. (Well, except the ones that are his paying customers.) But Gannon isn't the only right-winger who is disingenously feigning concern over the future of gays in utero. LaShawn Barber did the same, thinking she's as clever as Gannon, like this hasn't occured to anyone else before, as though either of them are capable of original thought.

So why the sudden concern from right-wingers that someday people who believe in choice will abort their gay offspring? Wouldn't they prefer a world where there are fewer liberal gays anyways? There is something else behind this. In Barber's comments more than a few posters elude to the fact that they want to see a catfight between the gays and the choice movement. Sorry, it ain't going to happen. Apparently Gannon and Barber don't seem to understand that for many of us GLBT rights and choice are intrinsically linked by the right to privacy-- Lawrence alone illustrates that fact. Additionally, why would we listen to a homophobe and a self-loathing homo anyways?

I'm sorry, the GLBT community does not need any shamless, hypocritical sleazeballs like Jeff Gannon lecturing us on right and wrong. Feel like writing a Letter to the Editor and telling them so?