Back when The Advocate put "Gay is the new Black" on its cover and you couldn't find a gay internet forum without a white gay person saying that we were "the last minority it's OK to discriminate against" or some such drivel, did you ever wonder how stupid it would sound if homophobes said the same thing? Well, wonder no more:
I mean, only white people, you know what I'm saying? Would African Americans, after a successful action like the Birmingham bus boycott (which, by the way, required more risk than sending a few bucks to pay for homophobic ads in California), have complained that they received sternly-worded postcards?
This is bigotry 2.0. It's a little different from the racism and nativism of the last century in that the haters now demand we boo-hoo with them over their self-esteem and they accuse everyone else of being a bigot against them. With logic that would bewilder the average 8-year-old, they say it's intolerant not to tolerate intolerance, so there!
So there, indeed. It's about as important as this deep, philosophical question: could Jesus have heated water so hot that even he couldn't have touched it? Or, more precisely, asking if it's OK to be tolerant of intolerance is about as valuable as asking if vegans can swallow.
The right isn't going to demonize the Black people of the Civil Rights Era as much, though. According to bigotry 2.0, Black people in the Civil Rights Movement were saints... the only nuance is that, as a result of decades of revisionist history, they were only fighting against the most overt racism, were blind to white privilege, happily shared most of the same values as the Confederate-flag waving crowd of 2009, and were looking forward to the day when they could put away their signs and say, "Well, glad that racism thing is over. Now let's go get some real jobs." (That day occurred some time before Nixon's resignation and is excluded from librul elitist history books because grumble grumble ACORN grumble NEA grumble....)
Anyway, the local NAACP chapter responded:
The analogy in Oaks' speech has sparked some debate already in Utah. The NAACP in Salt Lake City said it was not appropriate for Oaks to make the comparison.
"I think that a lot of times that people don't stop and think because they have not had to walk in the shoes of African Americans," said Jeanetta Williams, President of the NAACP Salt Lake Branch.
What's annoying about both gays saying that they're the new black and Mormons saying they're the new black is that they're both based on the same cartoonish history of the Civil Rights Movement most white people learn in the US. Moreover, they're nothing more than cynical attempts to tie one's own suffering, however one defines it, to the pure and perfect sufferers of American history: Black people before they got all those special rights that unfairly helped them get ahead.
All of which does nothing to help Black people. But, then again, white people, am I right?