This whole saga regarding Joy Reid is putting me in a really bad place and increasingly I’ve realized it is not entirely Reid or what I increasingly see as her purposeful attempts to obfuscate the facts regarding her defunct blog. This morning I came to the realization that part of what was putting me in a bad place were the tone of many of the comments blindly defending Reid without any or much regard to how those comments impact the LGBT community. While I recognize there is no such thing as a right to not be offended and that often times people ought to be the subject of offensive language to rattle their way of thinking and the get them to reconsider certain ideas, this is different. Then I came across a comment from Chrislove, who has been a fellow LGBT member of the Daily Kos community for a very long time. He said
I will just say that reading the dismissive tone of some of the comments and diaries posted here at Daily Kos (and seeing the high numbers of recs those comments/diaries garner) has been both eye-opening and hurtful. It takes me back to a time when there were people on this site who bent over backward to defend Obama’s anti-marriage equality stance, sometimes in the most hurtful way possible. Regardless of the outcome of this episode, my view of some people on this blog (people I thought were allies) has changed, perhaps irreparably. Even though much has changed for the better for us LGBT people, some things perhaps haven't changed as much as I thought they had.
And another longtime LGBT member and warrior of the infamous 2009-2011 Obama sux/rox wars on LGBT issues FogCityJohn immediately replied “1,000 imaginary recs.” I realized I’m not alone in this, that other longtime members of the LGBTQ community here are getting the same vibe again. It was a bad vibe in the early Obama years that really made me question how progressive the Daily Kos community really is. It seemed a large number of the folks here back then felt the purpose for the existence of the LGBT community was to praise Obama, write checks for the DNC, vote Democratic regardless of what Democrats did or didn’t do for us and “shut our fucking pie holes” about that gay sh*t because Democrats keep losing elections because of LGBT perverts. There was a palpable air of homophobia here and by golly some of us were going to stand up to it and fight it. And guess what, we were right. We were right about marriage. We were right about DADT. We were right about Obama not being bound by a super blood oath take to infinity plus one to defend DOMA in court to his last breath. We were right about just about everything we had been pushing for and it seemed the rest of the community here finally said that too and we moved forward. And that was a great thing. But now, it is all coming back and we’re having to see for ourselves those positive leaps forward we in the LGBT community thought we had made were perhaps just tiny baby steps and the hate and hurt that had been hurled against us that we had forgiven and moved past is still there lurking below the surface.
Discussing the Joy Reid situation has not been a pleasant experience. It is hard for many of us because her current manifestation on MSNBC has been a progressive champion. Some are seemingly willing to forgive her for everything, including what appears to be outright lies about being hack. Some here in the LGBT community are going to find forgiving her for her blatant transphobic references and accusations of gay men going after post-pubesent teen boys hard to forgive, especially if she can’t muster the courage to admit she wrote them and no longer believes what she wrote. I suppose the people who support her regardless of the things she did 10 years ago and the things she is doing now to conceal that past without confronting it are entitled to do so and still claim to be progressives and that it doesn’t affect Reid’s credibility. To them I suppose it doesn’t, but they should think long and hard about the affect of Reid’s comments and her coverup of them on the people to whom her hurtful comments were directed, including your fellow LGBTQ brothers and sisters here at Daily Kos.