TIM HARDAWAY WILL NEVER BE INVITED to my house for Sunday brunch. I’ll never have Kenneth Eng and Isaiah Washington at my Thanksgiving dinner party either. Mel Gibson is not a likely candidate for several reasons.
What do these people have in common? Hardaway hates gay people, Eng is the journalist who is in hot water for his “Why I hate black people” column, and Mel, well, other than being a homophobic anti-Semite, virulently catholic, I suppose he’d make for interesting dinner conversation, but the indigestion he’d give me wouldn’t be worth it.
I’m bothered by the fact that a black professional athlete can make blanket statements like “ I hate gay people.” There is little hue and cry against him, against the profession he plays in. To make matters worse, the black community as a whole was strangely silent. The black community is much like the current Administration in Washington in their attitudes toward gay people. They most likely both think that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is a good policy, in spite of the mounting evidence to the contrary.
The lack of outrage by the black community on this topic, is disappointing to me. I know the arguments are that Hardaway was just expressing himself and exercising his First Amendment rights of Free Speech. That is true.
But so was Eng. Eng was the 20 something writer whose column in AsianWeek sparked outrage from across the political spectrum. His column listed reasons why he hates black people. He lists first person experiences. He cites historical discrimination as sociological traits of blacks.
Black leaders were in full throated attack on this type of “hate speech.” Liberal leftists were aghast that a newspaper would publish such a shocking column. His publisher backed away from the column faster than a naked man frying bacon.
Yet I fail to see how Eng’s statements on his allegedly true life experiences with the black community, and the resulting feelings he has, are fundamentally different from Hardaway’s statements.
Hardaway’s statements could easily be interpreted as a call for a modern day Holocaust Redux.
“They shouldn’t be in the world. Or the United States,” said Hardaway.
Those words could just have easily have been said by David Duke, Ph.D. — ex leader of the KKK — or by segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond, the late cousin of Reverend Al Sharpton and father of an illegitimate mixed race daughter.
But back to the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” part. The black community in general, is not welcoming of homosexuals amongst themselves. I believe that this is an outgrowth of their old-school Christian background. Perhaps black religious leadership who are trying to set a moral standard in times of lax morality are behind it.
By taking the Old Testament prohibitions, and using them in a New Testament sermon, the church leaders are using gays as a focal point for hatred and intolerance, to incite a sense of commonality and purpose in their memberships, and this gets passed on to people like Hardaway as an acceptable prejudice.
These preachers and their followers have latched on to the last group that can be publicly demeaned.
Thankfully, the path of gay rights and gay visibility is moving quickly, due in part to men like Eric Alva, the reputed first Marine to be wounded in the Iraq war.
This 36-year-old poster boy hero, was a prized photo opportunity for the likes of President George Bush, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and forner Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
And to their collective gasps, this week Alva has come out as a gay man, leading the drive in the human rights campaign fight to get Congress to repeal the official “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy of the military.
It is one of those delicious ironies that the media darling of the Republicans — at the start of the war — turns out to be a gay man, who lives with his partner in Texas.
I don’t agree with Eng. I don’t like the statements that Hardaway made. I’m not a fan of Gibson and I certainly don’t like Duke.
But... They all have the right to say what they said, to think what they think, and so long as they don’t physically harm someone or incite others to do physical harm, their rights to say their words, however obnoxious, idiotic, trite and shallow they may be, their rights to say those words need to be protected.
It is just ironic to me that the poster boy defending the right to free speech, for a black man, an Asian man, and an immigrant, is a gay man despised by the black man and the immigrant.
It was that very same gay man who lost a leg fighting in a foreign country, and he couldn’t even tell his best buddies in a foxhole about his boyfriend without losing his job or getting his butt kicked. The job of defending the rights of the bigots and the racists is never easy.
I guess he really is the hero here. He can come to dinner anytime.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 6, 2007. Read the original PDF.