New York
‘Gay-Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance of Gays Back 50 Years,” learn a 2001 headline within the Onion. “The event confirmed the worst fears of thousands of non-gay spectators,” the satire stated, “cementing in their minds a debauched and distorted image of gay life straight out of the most virulent right-wing hate literature.”
I considered this Sunday morning as I arrived for the Tikvah Fund’s Jewish Leadership Conference. Outside, a crowd numbering maybe two dozen had gathered to protest a deliberate look by Florida’s Gov.
Ron DeSantis.
I snapped photographs of them from the again seat of my cab, and so they shouted insults at me, some printable (“You’re complicit!”), some not. “You’re a good German,” stated a man holding a preprinted signal studying DeSANTIS IS A TYRANT.
The set off for his or her rage was the Sunshine State’s Parental Rights in Education Act—inevitably termed the “Don’t Say Gay” invoice in propagandistic media experiences—which Mr. DeSantis signed in March. The regulation prohibits “classroom instruction . . . on sexual orientation or gender identity” earlier than the fourth grade and requires that any such educating of older youngsters be “age-appropriate.”
That made the governor persona non grata on the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the place Tikvah had deliberate to carry its occasion.
Elliott Abrams
and
Eric Cohen
wrote in these pages final month that museum employees informed organizers Mr. DeSantis didn’t “align with the museum’s values and its message of inclusivity” and due to this fact needed to be excluded. (In a later assertion to the press, the museum stated that “no one was banned or cancelled” as a result of “no contract with the Tikvah Fund was ever signed.” The assertion additionally claimed the article “contains many factual inaccuracies” however didn’t specify what they had been.)
Tikvah as a substitute rented Pier 60 on the Hudson River waterfront’s Chelsea Piers Sports & Entertainment Complex. The Chelsea Piers group got here underneath stress to cancel too, together with from House Judiciary Committee Chairman
Jerrold Nadler,
who tweeted that “it is disgraceful” Mr. DeSantis can be allowed to talk on the venue “during the month in which we celebrate the diversity and resilience of the LGBTQ+ community.”
The group responded in a method assured to make no one blissful: by kowtowing with out knuckling underneath. On Friday it issued a statement each denouncing Mr. DeSantis’s unspecified “abhorrent behavior” and disclaiming the flexibility to regulate “the content, program, or speakers” at occasions organized by its rental clients.
In his wide-ranging 40-minute speech, Mr. DeSantis took the kerfuffle in stride: “When the left’s having a spasm, that just tells you that in Florida, we are winning on the issues that matter.” His knack for bringing out the worst in his political enemies is harking back to
Donald Trump,
however with the benefit that the governor doesn’t take it personally.
Chelsea Piers stated in its assertion that in gentle of the “enormous stress” Mr. DeSantis had induced within the firm and “the LGBTQ+ community,” Chelsea Piers would donate all proceeds from the Tikvah rental to “groups that protect LGBTQ+ communities, and foster and amplify productive debates about LGBTQ+ issues.” That ought to—however certainly received’t—pass over any group that demanded Mr. DeSantis’s cancellation. Prohibiting one facet from defending its views—particularly when these views are official coverage—makes nonsense of the thought of constructive debate.
Not that there was a lot urge for food for debate among the many protesters exterior. Walking alongside the sidewalk after the convention wrapped up, I noticed two sexagenarians—a person with a sprawling beard and a lady in a black SILENCE=DEATH T-shirt—following an older convention attendee and screaming on the prime of their lungs: “Shame!” “Fascist” “Nazi!” “You spit on the six million!”
It all made the Onion’s “debauched and distorted” gay-pride stereotype appear quaint. A nasty mob focusing on a Jewish convention as a Nazi entrance—a actuality in 2022 New York—was past a satirist’s creativeness twenty years in the past.
Mr. Taranto is the Journal’s editorial options editor.
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Source: www.wsj.com”