Gays and lesbians face accusations of depravity and immorality every day. Someone is always ready to charge them with corrupting marriage, call them too irresponsible to raise children or blame them for spreading disease.
But did you know they're violent criminals, too?
Townhall.com's Joel Mowbray boldly reports in his latest column, \Gay Crime Syndicate?,"" that students from New York's new Harvey Milk High School have formed a ""gay mafia."" He says the crime syndicate from the all-gay, lesbian and transgender school has preyed ruthlessly on men simply trying to purchase hookers.
Dressed as female prostitutes, a gang of five hoods robbed johns of wallets full of cash, credit and debit cards before being arrested Nov. 6.
As if that crime isn't evidence enough of widespread gay criminality, Mowbray links these crimes to a seemingly unrelated incident in which other Harvey Milk students assaulted a man outside a Starbucks.
Mowbray makes it clear that he would never-gasp-generalize isolated incidents of criminal behavior into a wholesale judgment on millions of people.
Instead, he argues that it isn't homosexuality that causes criminal violence, but allowing homosexuals to be near one another. He says putting ""scared confused youths-many of whom may incorrectly believe they are gay or bisexual,"" into a separate environment is the equivalent of ""putting a lit match into a tinder box.""
And because every problem can be solved with violence, Mowbray advises not gay segregation, but that traditional schools ""teach gay teens how to beat the snot out of bullies.""
I myself am not for gay/straight-segregated high schools, but Mowbray's proposal of using martial arts training to turn public schools into publicly funded academies of gay vigilante justice is untenable at best.
More importantly, Mowbray's column stinks of the faux-tolerant approach conservatives tend to take on race, gender and religion. Columnists like Mowbray preface their arguments with statements like ""Now, I would never say anything bad about homosexuals, black people or Muslims,"" and then flinging ""maybes"" and ""perhapses,"" do precisely that.
Bill O'Reilly is the modern master of this technique. He insists that his strange vendetta against hip-hop has nothing to do with racism and then hurls wild accusations about the black community's ""widespread acceptance of intoxication"" (""The Black Challenge"" Dec. 10, 2001).
There are two easy steps to this rhetorical dance-first say you aren't racist, sexist or homophobic. Then assert that non-whites and homosexuals are violent or irresponsible or intoxicated as a group, even though you certainly can't prove it.
Meanwhile, Mowbray himself belongs to a group that runs a high incidence of criminal behavior: Townhall.com columnists.
Indeed, Mowbray writes along with approximately 60 columnists on the conservative Heritage Foundation-funded site, a few of whom are among the highest-profile criminals of the 20th century.
G. Gordon Liddy alone boasts nine felony convictions, including burglary and conspiracy for his role in the Watergate Hotel break-in. Charles Colson went down in the same scandal. Were it not for a technicality, Oliver North would have three standing convictions for helping to conduct a secret war in Nicaragua that killed 30,000.
But the fact that these guys are criminals doesn't make Mowbray more likely to commit crimes if he is allowed to work with them and share their ideologies, does it?
I could never argue that Mowbray might ""mistakenly believe himself to be conservative"" and claim that allowing him to be around other conservatives, some of whom are felons, would be like ""putting a lit match into a tinder box,"" could I?
No, of course not. That would be dumb.
Dan is a senior majoring in journalism. He can be reached at dlhinkel@wisc.edu. His column runs every Thursday in The Daily Cardinal.
