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Brandon Ambrosino: Witch, Communist, Or Gay Uncle Tom?

Homintern commissar Slate writer Mark Joseph Stern can’t decide if the gay writer Brandon Ambrosino is a witch, a Communist, or a gay Uncle Tom. But he does know that Vox shouldn’t have hired such a notorious Enemy Of The People. Excerpt: If you’re unfamiliar with Ambrosino’s oeuvre, his instantly infamous Martin Luther King article will tell […]

Homintern commissar Slate writer Mark Joseph Stern can’t decide if the gay writer Brandon Ambrosino is a witch, a Communist, or a gay Uncle Tom. But he does know that Vox shouldn’t have hired such a notorious Enemy Of The People. Excerpt:

If you’re unfamiliar with Ambrosino’s oeuvre, his instantly infamous Martin Luther King article will tell you everything you need to know about his particular brand of hackery. Ambrosino writes in only one mode, an irritating combination of smug sophistry and homophobia apologism, and his sole aim seems to be to inform conservatives that their worst fears about gay people are absolutely correct. See how, in his MLK piece, Ambrosino rewrites not just King’s legacy but his actual words in order to shoehorn them into his preposterous proposition that gays are oppressing straight people. Conservatives adore these desperate performances of self-flagellation, which lend validity to their own claims of persecution. It doesn’t matter that Ambrosino’s arguments are unfounded, insulting, and wrong. The novelty of a gay writer scorning gay people for daring to assert their own equality draws accolades from right-wingers, who seize upon Ambrosino’s stories in their efforts to smear the LGBTQ community as a “reflexively irate, rage-blinded” mob.

Yet Ambrosino’s main problem is not that he defends homophobia; the New York Times’ Ross Douthat does that too, but at least Douthat’s views arise from real intelligence and conviction. Ambrosino’s worldview, so far as he has one, is primarily comprised of crass opportunism and toxic narcissism. His writing is a quagmire of tedious ideas and sloppy prose; his angry jabs at the LGBTQ community reek of a writer legitimizing his insecurities by presenting them to an audience that should know better.

Goodness. Shouldn’t his copy editor at Slate have punctuated each sentence with an exclamation mark? After reading this Two-Minute Hate against a guy who is a sensitive and intelligent writer, I had to read this “instantly infamous” MLK piece he wrote for Time. Here’s an excerpt:

The current landscape of queer politics is growing increasingly hostile. We no longer prize intellectual conversation, preferring instead to dismiss our opponents in 140-character feats of rhetoric. We routinely scour the private lives and social media accounts of our political opponents in the hopes of demonizing them as archaic, unthinking, and bigoted. Whenever we find an example of queer hatred, we are quick to convince the public that the only proper way to deal with these haters is to hate them.

In contrast to contemporary gay activists, King found a way to condemn evil without condemning the evildoer. From within the midst of a people grown weary with struggle, King stood up to remind the oppressed of the humanity of their oppressors; to remind them that if love were the goal, then the path of hatred would never lead them there.

This isn’t to suggest King wasn’t angry — he was. With the righteous indignation of a prophet, he demanded that his society grant him the dignity that God had guaranteed him. But King’s anger must be situated within his overall ethics of nonviolent resistance. King might have marched into the corrupt marketplace of his day, hurling to the ground every graven ideology of injustice; but his actions and his message only have meaning when they are framed within his firm conviction that “unconditional love will have the final word in reality.”

Though we have come quite far in the past few years, we are still routinely discriminated against. But rather than follow King’s example, some of us have decided to meet ideological violence head on with our own. We demand to be taken seriously, even as we dismiss our opponents’ request that we listen to them.

Here, too, we can learn from King, who calls us to “see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves.” For, as he reasons, it is possible for all of us to “learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.” When we listen to our enemies — no, when we listen to our brothers — we allow ourselves the opportunity to effect lasting change at relational levels. Further, by seeking to understand those with whom we disagree, we call bluff on the entire system of fundamentalism, which is the very condition that makes ideological tyranny possible in the first place.

This is what sent Mark Joseph Stern to his fainting couch? I had not seen this Time piece, but its sheer humanity made me want to stand up and cheer. Brandon Ambrosino will do more to change minds and turn hearts than a thousand cartoonishly militant Mark Joseph Sterns.

Good for Vox for hiring someone who actually thinks and reflects to cover gay issues, and who tries to see the other side, even if he ultimately disagrees with it, versus Slate, which satisfies itself with employing someone who mistakes outrage for integrity. If Brandon Ambrosino is the Martin Luther King of the gay rights movement, then Mark Joseph Stern is Stokely Queermichael. 

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan talks good sense on this dust-up. Excerpt:

He is unusual, in as much as his journey into gay life from religious fundamentalism inevitably makes his take on being gay a very particular – and fascinating – one. But guess what? Millions of gay people are born and brought up in fundamentalist Christian environments and families. Understanding their lives and finding a place for them in the world is something we should be striving to achieve rather than attempting to snuff out. And gays from fundamentalist backgrounds can help us engage in dialogue with some of our most dedicated opponents. What I found truly disgusting about some of the commentary is that they tried to portray the man as somehow a Jerry Falwell clone. That’s a deliberate lie and a smear. And it springs from anti-Christian animus.

I’m reminded in all this of a notorious essay the black critic Stanley Crouch wrote in the 1980s about Spike Lee. It was called, as I remember, “Do the Race Thing”; I can’t find it online. As I recall, Crouch criticized Lee for saying that blacks need to gain media power to “control the message” about black life. Crouch said that the goal ought to be to *broaden* the messages about black life, not control them. I agree, about blacks, gays, conservatives, Christians, everybody.

UPDATE.2: Commenter Jones says:

I honestly think the gay marriage phenomenon will seem in hindsight like the war on Iraq. I have the same feeling as I did then that an honest and open discussion of the issue was impossible. We went directly to the collective hysteria phase, and regretted it for the next decade-ish.

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