We’re very sorry to see that Troy Mayor Janice Daniels (whom we incorrectly identified as mayor-elect in our previous post) did not stand her ground.
On Monday she gave her opponents an inch, and all week we’ve had to endure them gobbling up a mile of hypocritical high ground. As we ought to have learned from the entire Obama term in office, this is what comes from giving in to bullies.
It’s only worse that it’s happening during a week when the governor signed an anti-bullying bill.
I’ll summarize briefly:
On Monday Daniels showed up unexpectedly at a Troy High School protest organized by the school’s Gay Straight Alliance. She attempted to apologize to 30 or 40 protesters. But, according to the kid who organized the protest, “it erupted into people screaming at her and calling her 'bully.' " (“Protesters urge Troy mayor Janice Daniels to quit over gay slur”).
On Monday night the hate-Daniels feast moved to the Troy City Council meeting, where Daniels had to sit through a lot of people (and I’m sure none of them coincidentally included her bitter political enemies) telling her they didn’t like her. When she didn’t resign, talk turned to a boycott of Troy businesses.
Then on Tuesday, proving that the Occupy Wall Streeters’ contempt of businessmen for lacking all principles was at least fair when applied to Troy businessmen, Troy Chamber of Commerce president Michele Hodges announced that the Chamber was turning to the “Michigan Round Table for Diversity Inclusion” for suggestions on how to escape the wrath of Big Rainbow. (“Troy firms seek to avoid a boycott”). She may as well have announced the Troy C of C had just voted unanimously to add a Lady GaGa wig to the Chamber’s logo.
She noted suggestions could range from a call for anti-discrimination laws in Troy to a request for Daniels' resignation.
"Our goal is to do the healthiest, most solution-oriented thing — whatever that may be."
Neither of the suggestions she mentioned was healthy, in fact they are shockingly stupid. But I’m sure she was serious when she said she and her members will do anything – even support kicking out the new mayor -- to save their commercial establishments from pink picket lines.
On Thursday the Detroit Free Press let the prime ringleader of the Get Daniels Campaign, Denise Brogan-Kator executive director at Equality Michigan, write their guest editorial on the flap. (“Troy mayor's choice of words reveals unacceptable prejudice.”)
After identifying herself “[a]s a member of the gay and transgender community,” she says, “I see every day how the use of anti-gay or anti-transgender slurs -- at school, at work, where we shop, or just walking down the street -- inflicts real harm on us.”
Brogan-Kator knows perfectly well that Daniels’s reference to “queers” took place in none of those settings. Daniels’s Facebook post didn’t go hunting anyone down to hurt them. Brogan-Kator’s constituents had to hunt it down for themselves, and then be offended by what they had already been told they would find.
This is phony.
Brogan-Kator’s no fan of free speech, either. According to her, she can see into every last dark motive of a person using a word she doesn’t like. A slur against homosexuals, she writes, “is the outward proof of one's inner contempt for us, which also expresses itself in actions like bullying, harassment, job discrimination and often violence.”
Or, I say, it could just be a slur. Not every slur equates with violence. Not every slur even equates with hatred. If slurs equaled violence, the entire mainstream media and about half the American population would still be serving federal life sentences for all the contempt poured out on George W. Bush.
Nonetheless, Brogan-Kator recognizes no distinction between a word that offends her and an act of violence: “That is why anti-gay slurs must be intolerable in public discourse. It is not simply a matter of respect, which should be sufficient; it is also a matter of safety.”
By Brogan-Kator’s logic, Daniels’s “belief that marriage is between one man and one woman” is just “a familiar and dangerous” excuse for Daniels’s “deep animosity toward the gay community.” (I don’t know what these people imagine a mayor of a town of 80,000 can do to the gay community? – pass an ordinance prohibiting Troy bars from serving Cosmopolitans?)
The real tragedy of all this is that most of the people who turned out to call Mayor Daniels a bigot and demand her resignation after she apologized were going to do all those things anyway if she hadn’t. Such is ever the way with bullies. These bullies in particular are never going to accept an apology, because they’d lose all excuse for blackmailing Troy into adopting laws that the Gay-Rights movement wants.
The truth of it is that Mayor Daniels was at her strongest when her vocabulary, forbidden word and all, was still her own.
Now she’s off balance and we don’t know how things will turn out.
P.S. To round out the week’s hypocrisy, and to show that not all hard words will be banned in the Diversity Utopia, a couple of reasonably prominent Michiganians have shown their own inner contempt by applying the disgusting phrase “Tea Bagger” to Mayor Daniels, a double-standard repeated and repeated on the Internet. Timothy R. Fischer, Deputy Policy Director at the Michigan Environmental Council, tweeted this last Saturday: “Troy Mayor, Tea Bagger Janice Daniels, wants to send $8.4 mill federal funds back to Wash, exposes anti-gay feelings.” It was re-tweeted by Hugh McDiarmid, Jr. McDiarmid is Communications Director at the Michigan Environmental Council, and a former Detroit Free Press reporter. Need we even bother to ask if the Michigan Environmental Council needs to fear any repercussions? Just kidding.
And we have to mention a website named “Queerty,” with its tag line: FREE OF AN AGENDA. EXCEPT THE GAY ONE, (one of this week’s “Hot Topics” is “Bullying” ). Queerty offered a piece Thursday under the headline, “How Should We Punish Janice Daniels, the NYC-Hating, Bigoted Mayor of Troy, MI?”
Among the article’s suggestions “from a bunch of Queerty queers” of “the most appropriate punishment for Daniels’ original transgression and her further transgression of not apologizing appropriately?”:
- Let’s spam the bitch on Facebook. A campaign to mark her status as “Hate speech” has already succeeded, in a way: it aimed to get the offending Facebook status purged off her page, and it’s not there anymore, though she could have deleted it herself. I personally think flame-trolling her with messages is a little juvenile, but it could show her the sheer volume of people who are offended by her, nationally and internationally. Throw some foreign-language insults in there if you can… she’s probably xenophobic too.
By all means, you segment of America most satisfied your consciences are clean from all acts of hate, who see yourselves as most deserving of your “Mean People Suck” bumper stickers, who look down upon the rest of us with the meanest contempt because we still dare to question whether or not the homosexual lifestyle really is – as we’re told daily – completely normal, ineffably beautiful, and in many ways, preferable – by all means you ought to take the Queerty queers’ advice and spam the teabagging bitch on Facebook because she referred to homosexuals as “queers.”
Then try not to choke on the irony.
Ah, an interesting week it has been. Read on the web somewhere earlier in the week that a teacher in some hamlet someplace tampered with the lyrics of "Deck the Halls," in order to remove the oh-so offensive reference to "donning gay apparel" (knew that it was only a matter of time until that happened!). It turns out she made the move as every time her class got around to the "gay" apparel stanza they broke out into uncontrollable giggles....probably not unusual for kids who have no clue that the word "gay" once meant festive and lively!
ReplyDeleteOn a more serious note, I find it disconcerting when I read about individuals who not only deem the speech of others as unacceptable, but go on to suggest they should be penalized for their words.
I grew up under the notion that this was a free country and one could say whatever one wanted to without fear of incrimination. I was also taught that I was responsible for my words and should choose them carefully. That said, regardless of what I said no one advocated that I should be hauled off to prison.
There's far too much speech control going on than can be healthy for a country based on personal liberty.