Jonathan Capehart may only be pretty, dumb and clueless, but his popularity with the media as a safe right-wing gay spokesperson, exceeded only by another establishment lacky, Andrew Sullivan, is more than just an embarassment to thinking and caring queers everywhere; it's a very real threat to our survival, especially the survival of those who are most vulnerable.
In a column appearing today in the NY Daily News, he tells us that Tom Duane is "potentially standing in the way of gay rights." Capehart simply cannot understand why Duane, a privileged young urban professional like himself, someone who is already protected where he lives by New York City's human rights law, would be so interested in protecting people supposedly very unlike himself, the transgendered, by insisting that they be included in New York State's own incredibly-long-overdue Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA).
And let's be honest: Transgender issues are difficult for most people to understand. Even in Albany - where they have no problem passing complex budget bills with only a few minutes' review - the notion of extending protection to men and women who feel they were born the wrong gender would be hard to grasp.Could the answer be that the honorable Mr. Duane can actually see, and smell, beyond his nose, that he knows and understands the people who most need the protection which would be provided by SONDA, and that they are not newspaper columnists and state senators? Could it also be that he understands that he serves an entire community, and that he believes that such service demands courage and not merely professional calculation? Unless he realy believes the stuff he writes, Mr. Capehart should be asking himself about courage and calculation.
Employing the wisdom he reveals in his columns some forty years later, would Mr. Capehart have suggested to Martin Luther King, Jr., in the sixties that the stuggle for civil rights could collapse if King did not limit his initial objective to securing protections for those blacks who were most white?