Dan Savage: Big Mouth Little Journalism

I don't like Dan Savage very much and especially don't like that he's held up as some kind of great and positive figure representing LGBT* folk.  His sex advice goes from OK to dangerous and disastrous, his antics like turning "Santorum" into an especially gross and obscene synonym was attention getting but politically unproductive - it had nothing to do with the eclipse of Rick Santorum's political career - and early his role in "Draw Muhammad Day" combined all of the above with an indifference to the real possibility that his childish advocacy could have gotten people killed.   His more benign role in "It gets better" hardly makes up for the rest of it.   At the very least, he isn't a great role model of responsible adulthood in a group which is targeted by negative stereotypes of the past as superficial, immature and self-absorbed, attention-getting and not capable of being reliably serious and mature.  And I'm just waiting for the straight folk to tell me just how wrong I am about that, as if a life time of being a gay man didn't prepare me to understand that better than a life time of not being gay would.  I'm also used to being condescended to by straight folk from that life time of experience.

The link to this video was thrown at me a while back, I didn't watch it then but I did watch it this weekend and it is especially stupid and especially galling because its central premise is so obviously and demonstrably false.  The vid is entitled, "The Christian Left: Do They Exist?"  Despite what the disclaimer at the front of it says, there is no mature view point expressed.

So Savage, who has been part of the trendy religion bashing, Christian-bashing effort of the past dozen years is blaming liberal Christians that they aren't heard, claiming that liberal Christians haven't stood up to the fundamentalist right.

One thing about this is transparently clear, neither the alleged journalist, Savage nor "TakePart TV" did the minimum of fact checking as liberal Christians have done everything he claims they should start doing, have been doing it for, not only years but decades, only to have both the corporate media and the neo-atheists ignore that effort.

As I pointed out last week, the United Church of Christ began advocacy for the rights and equality of LGBT people in 1969, the year Savage turned five.  They've issued statement after statement, were pioneers in ordaining lesbians and gay men, expanding their commitment to equality just about every year in between that year and now.   And they are hardly the only Christian and Jewish denomination to have done so.   If Savage had done what counts as the minimal level of journalistic practice these days, a google search, he could hardly have failed to discover that.   And equality for us is not the only liberal effort that those churches and even many churches considered conservative have been engaged in.

Dan Savage is a media fixture, he's not a journalist, he isn't a mature voice or especially interested in knowing what he's talking about.  Savage has a long history of not knowing what he's talking about, loudly, vulgarly, in the most attention-getting way, an odd trait for an alleged journalist.   Though that's pretty much the standard of being a media celebrity today.  Unlike another person who uses vulgarity and brash expression, The Rude Pundit who is enough of a journalist to know what he's talking about when it comes to the substance of what he's saying.

Savage is a symptom of what's wrong with a large part of the alleged left today, why we aren't going anywhere. And he's hardly the only one.  Such people are just the flip side of the right wing media fixtures who spout off colorfully about things they don't know about and don't care enough to find out about.  They're not useful for making a convincing, fact-based case for something, they're only good for congregating those who are like them, such people don't make positive change, they're just camera hogs who are useful to our opponents.   I would classify him as being more of a libertarian than any kind of liberal or useful leftist.   While I wouldn't echo him and wish he "would just die"  or "be dragged by a truck until just the rope was left" I wish people would get tired of his act and look to someone who at least knows what they're talking about.

*  Considering his past comments about trans-folk and his "outing" of a public figure as trans, when they weren't, I'd be surprised if many informed people from that community would welcome him being considered as speaking for them.   I certainly don't want anyone mistaking him as representing how I think and live.