Tolerance for me, but not for thee

Did you read the other day about the gay hotel in Australia that has won the legal right to exclude straights and women? I have no problem with that. If the owners want to serve an exclusively gay male clientele, let them. I don't know what the laws are like in Oz, but as a philosophical matter, I think the right of private association is a very important one, and should be upheld in most instances. One may disapprove of straight-only or gay-only clubs, hotels and the like, but if freedom of association is to have any meaning, people have to have the right -- not the absolute right, note well -- to exclude others.

But notice: the laws in that Aussie province bar discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. How can it be legal for a hotel to bar heterosexuals, but not homosexuals? The victorious plaintiffs argued that it was necessary to provide a "safe" environment for gays. Which is a ridiculous, but effective strategy: the gay-rights organization GLSEN runs a campaign to introduce its philosophy into schools under the rubric of creating a "safe space" for gay kids. If they were really about stamping out anti-gay harrassment in schools -- something all decent people should support -- they would ride herd on school administrators to enforce the anti-bullying rules against gay-bashers. But it's not really about that: it's about mainstreaming a particular point of view by positioning it as an issue of civil order -- and putting opponents in the position of seeming to want school to remain an "unsafe space." It's quite a bit of rhetorical jujitsu.

In a related issue, Courage Man comments on a lawsuit being filed by a gay woman against an online heterosexual dating service for excluding her. It's utterly asinine, as CM articulately explains. If I signed up for a gay dating service, how unjust, not to mention stupid, would it be for me to complain that they're not accomodating breeders? Here's CM:

This is what the gay-rights movement of today is all about and why it should be absolutely resisted and discredited at every opportunity. It's not about social tolerance or having the right to be let alone in their private lives (even the homophobic CM, at least, treasures that and would not want to return to the bad-old pre-Stonewall days).

When a homosex advocate says he has no intention of persecuting or punishing people who morally object to homosexuality, or making you approve of his behavior, he is either lying or being disingenuous. "Gay rights" today is all about forcing other people to conform their private behavior to what homosexuals think it ought to be and what will benefit them. In other words, it has become the authoritarian.

UPDATE: A reader in the comboxes has said that I misunderstand GLSEN's activism, that it's merely about creating a "safe space" for gay and lesbian students. Here's an article I wrote a few years back for the Weekly Standard on GLSEN's activities in Massachusetts. Here, below, is an excerpt. I leave it to the reader to decide if this is about creating a "safe space," or something else:

Frustrated by official indifference, Whiteman secretly took his tape recorder along to the 10th annual conference of the Boston chapter of GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, at Tufts University on March 25. GLSEN (pronounced "glisten") is a national organization whose purpose is to train teachers and students and develop programs to, in the words of its Boston chapter leader, "challenge the anti-gay, hetero-centric culture that still prevails in our schools."

The state-sanctioned conference, which was open to the public but attended chiefly by students, administrators, and teachers, undercut the official GLSEN line--that their work is aimed only at making schools safer by teaching tolerance and respect.

The event, backed by the state's largest teachers' union, included such workshops as "Ask the Transsexuals," "Early Childhood Educators: How to Decide Whether to Come Out at Work or Not," "The Struggles and Triumphs of Including Homosexuality in a Middle School Curriculum" (with suggestions for including gay issues when teaching the Holocaust), "From Lesbos to Stonewall: Incorporating Sexuality into a World History Curriculum," and "Creating a Safe and Inclusive Community in Elementary Schools," in which the "Rationale for integrating glbt [gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender] issues in the early elementary years will be presented."

Whiteman sat in on a "youth only, ages 14-21" workshop called "What They Didn't Tell You About Queer Sex & Sexuality in Health Class." If "they" didn't tell you about this stuff, it's probably because "they" worried they'd be sent to jail.

The raucous session was led by Massachusetts Department of Education employees Margot Abels and Julie Netherland, and Michael Gaucher,an AIDS educator from the Massachusetts public health agency. Gaucher opened the session by asking the teens how they know whether or not they've had sex. Someone asked whether oral sex was really sex.

"If that's not sex, then the number of times I've had sex has dramatically decreased, from a mountain to a valley, baby!" squealed Gaucher. He then coaxed a reluctant young participant to talk about which orifices need to be filled for sex to have occurred: "Don't be shy, honey, you can do it."

Later, the three adults took written questions from the kids. One inquired about "fisting," a sex practice in which one inserts his hand and forearm into the rectum of his partner. The helpful and enthusiastic Gaucher demonstrated the proper hand position for this act. Abels described fisting as "an experience of letting somebody into your body that you want to be that close and intimate with," and praised it for putting one "into an exploratory mode."

Gaucher urged the teens to consult their "really hip" Gay/Straight Alliance adviser for hints on how to come on to a potential sex partner. The trio went on to explain that lesbians could indeed experience sexual bliss through rubbing their clitorises together, and Gaucher told the kids that male ejaculate is rumored to taste "sweeter if people eat celery." On and on like this the session went.

Know what happened to the guys who recorded the actual event and made it public? They got sued by GLSEN. I interviewed Alan Dershowitz and Harvey Silverglate, both liberals and civil-rights lawyers, who told me on the record (it's in the story) that these guys are victims of political correctness run amok.