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14 June 2013
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SF Pride Board Salutes U.S. Imperialism, Spits on Manning
With the eyes of the world on the court-martial of Bradley Manning,
controversy over his case has ripped through San Francisco’s large gay
community. After SF Pride members announced on April 26 that Manning had been
elected as an honorary grand marshal for the annual Gay Pride Day Parade on June
29-30, the SF Pride Board overturned the decision within hours. In a written
statement, SF Pride president Lisa L. Williams denounced Manning’s election as
“a mistake” that “should never have been allowed to happen.” Echoing the
government’s charge that Manning “aided the enemy” by revealing some of the
crimes of U.S. imperialism, Williams proclaimed that “even the hint of support
for actions which placed in harms [sic] way the lives of our men and women in
uniform…will not be tolerated by the leadership of San Francisco Pride.”
Enraged by Williams’ condemnation of a man they rightly view as a
hero, Manning supporters protested at a May 7 meeting of the Pride Board. The
Board then prevaricated, claiming that Manning’s election was a procedural
violation of a requirement that the grand marshal be a local gay person, and
declared the discussion over. But liberal Democratic city supervisor David
Campos, a gay Latino, mandated a public meeting to patch up the controversy,
pointing to Pride as “an organization which receives City funding.”
At a May 31 open forum in the Castro district, over 100 people,
including from groups like the Bradley Manning Support Network, Code Pink and
Iraq Veterans Against the War, confronted the Board and demanded Manning’s
reinstatement as honorary grand marshal. Speakers pointed out that Manning is
being witchhunted for telling the truth about the bloody deeds of the U.S. armed
forces. Indeed, some pointed out, left-talking Democrats in the Pride milieu
would have hailed Manning’s actions if the Republican Bush were still in the
White House, but they cannot stand telling the truth about Commander-in-Chief
Obama, a Democrat.
To widespread applause, a Spartacus Youth Club speaker declared at
the forum:
“Bradley Manning is a hero. He should be hailed for exposing U.S.
imperialist crimes and atrocities all over the world. By doing so, he performed
a great service to workers and the oppressed, and they in turn have a direct
interest in seeing him freed—immediately!
“But the SF Pride Board rejected Manning, spat on him and
denounced him. They’ve taken Obama’s side in the ‘war on terror,’ Obama’s side
in the war on civil liberties. They have sided with Manning’s jailers and
torturers. They apologize for and defend the greatest force of violence, terror
and oppression on earth: U.S. imperialism.”
Harking back to early days, many in attendance expressed dismay at
how right wing SF Pride has become since its founding over 40 years ago. One
longtime activist denounced the Board’s act as “a slap in the face to everything
that Pride once stood for.” He pointed out that after the 1969 Stonewall
rebellion that sparked the gay rights movement, gay activists, as part of the
broader New Left, called to end the Vietnam War and to free the Black Panthers.
Speakers attributed the Board’s repudiation of Manning to pressure from
corporations who fund the event and to gay vets and members of the military. On
June 7, the Board announced in a press release that speakers at the open forum
had failed to sway them. Bradley Manning is out as grand marshal.
Gay Rights and the Democratic Party Machine
Radical nostalgia aside, the bourgeois political line of SF Gay
Pride is no new thing. While always marked by liberal lifestylist politics, the
gay rights movement as a whole turned sharply right during the last 30 years
along with the national ascent of “family values” and American chauvinism, a
period of renewed attacks on workers, the poor and the oppressed and the erosion
of civil liberties. Gay rights came to mean the right to marry and the right to
serve in the military—two goals the old radicals would have disdained.
The San Francisco Democratic establishment learned decades ago how
to manipulate the rhetoric of “gay power” to bolster its rule, and Gay Pride Day
has become an institutionalized representation of this face of city government.
The co-optation of the rhetoric of gay rights into the fabric of Democratic
Party political life dates back to Harvey Milk, the city’s first openly gay
Supervisor and the first to march on Gay Pride Day.
After right-wing bigot Dan White murdered Mayor George Moscone and
Supervisor Milk in 1978, the city machine seized on the issue for political
capital. One of the first acts of Mayor Dianne Feinstein was to mandate the
recruitment of gays into the police force. For years, dozens of gay police have
headed up the parade with its “diversity” contingent of cops, squad cars and
paddy wagons. These are the same cops who harass, beat up and arrest homeless
people, sex workers and political protesters on the orders of Democratic Party
mayors and the Democratic Party-dominated Board of Supervisors. But liberal
activists do not protest the dominant presence of the police—the armed enforcers
of racist capitalist rule—because what is valued by the gay lifestylist agenda
is the cops’ sexual identity.
In San Francisco, “gay rights” rhetoric helps corral votes and
support to the liberal-chic face of City Hall. Thus former mayor Gavin Newsom
sought to bring his left-liberal opponents solidly into his camp by championing
gay marriage. The status quo in the city today shows that Harvey Milk’s strategy
of lifestyle liberation has succeeded in a limited way. He wanted being openly
gay to be openly accepted in San Francisco politics. Indeed, as gay marriage
rights are inching toward reality in state legislatures across the country, more
gay faces are appearing in high places.
But even as more gays are prominent in bourgeois politics, anti-gay
bigotry is exploding on the streets. Just last month Mark Carson, a 32-year-old
gay black man, was shot in the face at pointblank range in New York’s Greenwich
Village, widely considered one of the bubbles of safety for gay people. The
assailant taunted him with anti-gay slurs before pulling the trigger. This is no
aberration. On June 4, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs released
its 2012 report documenting the level of violence against gays. Along with
thousands of assaults, the coalition also documents a reported
total of 25 anti-gay homicides in the U.S. last year. The year before had the
highest total of documented killings: 30. The actual numbers are undoubtedly
higher.
Oppression Rooted in Class Society
To struggle effectively against the persecution of gays and others
who fall outside of the heterosexual “norm,” it is necessary to start with the
understanding that democratic rights in capitalist society are partial, fragile
and reversible. As fighters for the socialist liberation of humanity, we are
committed to full democratic rights for gays, lesbians and transgenders, and we
support any legal advances that can be wrested from the rulers of this cruelly
bigoted society. This includes the right to serve in the military. At the same
time, as Marxists we give not one iota of support to U.S. imperialism, the
world’s biggest terrorist force.
We support the right of gay people to marry and divorce, but we do
not advocate or prettify the institution of marriage. We fight for a society in
which no one needs to be forced into a legal straitjacket in order to get
medical benefits, visitation rights, custody of children, inheritance,
immigration rights or any of the privileges capitalist society grants to those
who are embedded in the traditional “one man on one woman for life” marital
mold. The Spartacist League vehemently opposes any government intrusion into
consensual sexual activity and private life. Government out of the bedrooms!
But there is nothing inherently revolutionary about an
unconventional lifestyle. The act of “coming out” may defy, but cannot
eradicate, class-rooted repressive institutions. The oppression of homosexuals,
like the oppression of women, serves as an index of more general social and
political attitudes. As the basic institution defining sexual relations, the
family, together with organized religion, mandates patriarchal social relations
and generalized anti-gay oppression. The family—the main source of the
oppression of women in class society—is necessary to the capitalist system of
exploitation. It regiments and teaches respect for authority to each new
generation of wage slaves and cannon fodder.
Harvey Milk thought that American capitalism was just fine. In that
sense, today’s SF Pride Board follows in his footsteps. They’re at peace with
bloody U.S. imperialism, too. Acceptance of the capitalist order, whether
captained by Democrats or Republicans, is antithetical to any genuine fight for
the liberation of black people, gays or any of the oppressed.
As the SYC speaker stressed at the May 31 Gay Pride forum:
“It is going to take a working-class revolution to bury the
American imperialist beast once and for all, and to ensure the complete
liberation of women, black people, gays and lesbians, all the oppressed. For
this to be successful, the world needs to know the truth about the systematic
violence and lies that prop up capitalist rule. And Bradley Manning helped get
the truth out. Free Bradley Manning!”
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