Taking Gay Hypocrites to Task Over Bradley Manning

Writer Susie Day asks whether the Obama administration’s preferable treatment of homosexuals could be providing political cover for a government whose wrongdoing was revealed by Bradley Manning’s providing of official documents to WikiLeaks.

“Bradley Manning has done something horrible to LGBT-town — far worse than revealing war crimes,” Day writes, satirically. “He raises the question: Do LGBT people, in some way, owe our improving legal status to those very war crimes Manning revealed?”

Day’s piece comes weeks after San Francisco Pride board President Lisa Williams disciplined a staff member for nominating Manning, a gay man, as grand marshal of the group’s parade. Not that Manning would want the honor, Day writes, as the LGBT community has “ignored the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and rarely if ever bother to protest, as LGBT people, foreign policy abuses.”

In helping to make public such records as a U.S. Apache helicopter’s attack on two Reuters journalists and 12 Iraqi civilians in 2007, Manning is no friend to gay people, Day suggests, with tongue firmly in cheek. After all, “during that helicopter massacre, you do not hear one antigay slur” from the attacking soldiers, she writes.

“Is [Manning] the type of person we want as our Grand Marshal? I’m all for outing people, but classified data is just TMI,” Day continues. “Yet Bradley Manning brutally ripped the door off the U.S. Army’s closet, thus placing in harm’s way the troops who daily and heroically place innocent civilians in harm’s way.  He has betrayed our deep psychological need not to know anything about what our government does in our name.”

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

Susie Day at MR ZINE:

In June, Manning will begin his trial — much of which will be, thank God, secret — a trial that will revive the homophobic stereotype LGBT-town has worked for years to erase: the commie fag.  To counter that stereotype, it’s important for us to surround ourselves — as does SF Pride — with peppy, stalwart capitalist sponsors like Verizon, AT&T, and Wells Fargo (the latter, a proud investor in the private prison industry; take that, commie fag).

In conclusion: DUH?!  It is impossible for Bradley Manning to be the Grand Marshal of any Gay Pride event: He’s in prison, you idiots.  He can’t really be there.

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