Here’s a little more evidence of how totalitarian politics drives people insane: a coalition of 35 LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) groups has released an open letter entitled “Trayvon Deserves Justice.” The letter, of course, completely ignores everything that happened during George Zimmerman’s murder trial. Remember, totalitarianism endures by erasing history; inconvenient facts are ignored or edited to suit political outcomes.
We cannot begin to imagine the continued pain and suffering endured by Trayvon Martin’s family and friends. We stand in solidarity with them as they continue to fight for justice, civil rights and closure. And we thank everyone who has pushed and will continue to push for justice.
Trayvon Martin deserves justice and his civil rights. We support the organizations and community leaders who are urging the federal government to explore every option to ensure that justice is served for Trayvon and that his civil rights are honored and respected. But our work does not end there: we will honor Trayvon Martin by strengthening our commitment to end bias, hatred, profiling and violence across our communities.
We represent organizations with diverse lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender constituencies. Our community has been targets of bigotry, bias, profiling and violence. We have experienced the heart-breaking despair of young people targeted for who they are, who they are presumed to be, or who they love: Rashawn Brazell, Lawrence King, Ali Forney, Brandon Teena, Brandon White, Matthew Shepard, Marco McMillian, Angie Zapata, Sakia Gunn, Gwen Araujo and countless others.
Every person, regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity, must be able to walk the streets without fear for their safety.
Justice delayed is justice denied and in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “a right delayed is a right denied.” We honor Trayvon by seeking justice for all people.
Note the other totalitarian strategies at work. Individuals don’t matter. Politically useful people blend into a great shapeless mass, until Trayvon Martin is just like Matthew Shepard. The actual person named Trayvon Martin, his words and deeds, are erased to make room for a stained-glass icon.
Words don’t matter, either. Phrases like “justice” and “civil rights” are stripped of all intrinsic meaning and deployed as blunt political instruments. The conclusion here is pre-ordained: George Zimmerman is the Devil and must be punished. That’s what they mean by “justice.” Facts, logic, law, due process… these are elements of literal justice, not the metaphysical political construct of the same misleading name. Extra layers of meaning and significance are pumped into a sad, but fairly straightforward story until it bursts.
Most curiously of all, the only LGBT aspect of the Zimmerman case is that Trayvon Martin’s friend Rachel Jeantel has stated – both during the trial, and in later television interviews – that she and Trayvon profiled George Zimmerman as a gay sexual predator. Jeantel actually used the word “rapist.” She said this during the trial, but of course it’s already pretty clear that the authors of this “open letter” weren’t paying any attention to what was said during the trial – they’re busy pretending it didn’t happen at all.
The day after their letter was written, she repeated the “gay rapist” story during a CNN interview. Explaining why Martin was “freaked out” by Zimmerman’s observation of him, Jeantel said, “Definitely after I say may be a rapist, for every boy, for every man, every – who’s not that kind of way, seeing a grown man following them, would they be creeped out? So you have to take it – as a parent, when you tell your child, when you see a grown person following you, run away, and all that.”
Except Martin did not run away. He’d be alive if he had done so. He deliberately provoked a close-range confrontation with the man he supposedly thought might be a gay stalker, and in a later interview, Jeantel conceded that Martin probably threw the first punch. She also changed her story yet again and invented some new dialogue she supposedly overheard from Zimmerman, so it’s wise not to read too much into anything she says. But no one has yet introduced any significant reason to doubt Zimmerman’s assertion that Martin escalated the confrontation to a fistfight, and there’s absolutely no question that Martin initiated the confrontation, despite having ample opportunity to avoid it. That’s something all the people nattering on about “Stand Your Ground” laws conveniently forget to mention. Martin’s the one who refused an open, obvious, reasonable opportunity to retreat from a potentially violent situation.
Jeantel has also gone to great lengths to explain that Zimmerman should have accepted the “whoop ass” beating Martin gave him. So 35 gay-rights groups just issued a passionate statement of support for someone who confronted and attacked a man he believed was a homosexual stalker, and seem to agree with the notion that putative gay man should have taken his beating without excessive resistance. And these groups did it because their totalitarian loyalty to the grand leftist political collective outweighs their ostensible mission. Politics over all!
