Make a Difference

Day: October 2, 2010

Approved Narrative Unwinds

Student Tyler Clementi committed sucide after being videoed having gay sex.

He was the fourth gay teen suicide in the US this month. The national LGBT community is reeling.

The bullying must stop! Gays must be given equal rights now!

That’s the approved narrative.

But actual events do not support that interpretation of Tyler Clementi’s death. He was aware he had been taped, and didn’t seem that bothered by it. Remarkably unbothered, in fact, compared with how I would feel if someone had surreptitiously made a sex tape featuring me.

The gay lobby is using this young man’s suicide to gain political advantage, as they did with the death of Matthew Shepard.

The approved narrative was that Matthew was murdered simply because he was gay.

The reality is that his death had nothing to do with his sexual orientation. He was killed by two drug addicts, one of whom was known to him (Shepard was also a heavy drug user) in a robbery that went wrong.

There seems to be an instant assumption by Ellen DeGeneres and other ‘being gay is my career’ minor celebrities that the murder or suicide of any person who has ever had gay sex, or ever spoken about gay sex, must have happened because they were gay.

That is not only nonsense, it is insulting. Homosexual people live lives as varied as anyone else.

Their lives are no less likely than those of any other citizen to intersect with people who are cruel or dangerous. More likely in the case of Matthew Shepard, who was both indiscriminately sexually active, and a drug abuser.

To claim these deaths for political purposes disregards other aspects of the lives of the victims. It makes them one dimensional, cardboard cutouts suitable for placards, not real people.

It is cynical and exploitative.

Those Sunnies Are Expensive

The UK’s Daily Mail reports toady that Bono’s ONE foundation received donations of 9.6 million pounds in 2008.

Only 118,000 pounds (just over 1%) was given to people in need.

5.1 million pounds was paid in salaries. The rest was spent on ‘raising awareness.’ And sunglasses.

To be fair, the ONE foundation has always advertised itself (which it does very well) as an advocacy organisation.

For example, one of the things it advocates for is increased government commitment to development assistance for developing nations.

You know, the kind of development assistance that developing nation economists have been saying for years should be stopped, because it hinders real local and national economic development, and slows the climb out of poverty.

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