Editorial- A Sense Of Irony?

By Brody Levesque | WASHINGTON D.C. -- Nearly five decades ago, a prominent conservative American politician was giving his opinion as to why he saw no issue with the segregation and treatment of black Americans. One of the factors he attributed to blacks as a justification, for example, in not allowing interracial marriage, was the scientific evidence that most blacks had much lower intelligence than white people.

Of course, when you look at the history and contributions of noted black Americans such as Dr. Charles Drew, that line of reasoning pretty much was rubbish and flies in the face of the historical truth.

Drew, when he was a medical student at Columbia University, wrote a dissertation on "Banked Blood" in which he described a technique he developed for the long-term preservation of blood plasma. Prior to his discovery, blood could not be stored for more than two days because of the rapid breakdown of red blood cells.

Dr.Drew had discovered that by separating the plasma (the liquid part of blood) from the whole blood (in which the red blood cells exist) and then refrigerating them separately, they could be combined up to a week later for a blood transfusion. He also discovered that while everyone has a certain type of blood (A, B, AB, or O) and thus are prevented from receiving a full blood transfusion from someone with different blood, everyone has the same type of plasma. Thus, in certain cases where a whole blood transfusion is not necessary, it was sufficient to give a plasma transfusion which could be administered to anyone, regardless of their blood type. He convinced Columbia University to establish a blood bank and soon was asked to go to England to help set up that country's first blood bank. Drew became the first Black to receive a Doctor of Medical Science degree from Columbia.

Lower intelligence you say? Quite obviously I could cite numerous examples of prominent Black Americans whose contributions to the American republic were as significant as Dr. Drew's in many different fields of expertise and endeavor.

Today the ignorance of bigotry and bias is raising its ugly head once again in American society with the LGBTQ community as its target. Let me cite the most recent examples;

On the subject of the California Legislature approving a law that mandates adding the contributions of prominent LGBTQ Californians to that state's school texts. Conservative radio host and son of former president Ronald Reagan, Michael Reagan said on the air:

"It will prove instructive to see how the state's lawmakers go about the job of implementing this absurd legislation. Will they, for example, rule that textbooks must describe what the state classifies as acceptable behavior? Or exactly how? Should the state require textbooks used in its schools to provide play-by-play descriptions of the behavior they sanction? Just where does this stop? Should not the 'contributions' of convicted thieves be celebrated? Or those of serial killers? Or embezzlers?

The matter of the content of school textbooks has long been a controversial subject, but until now it has never reached the point where specific parts of the population are singled out for preferential treatment, especially when the segment of the population is distinguished solely by their sexual preferences."

Apparently LGBTQ citizens are in the same category of criminals as serial killers, thieves, etc.

Not to be outdone of course was the following exchange between Linda Harvey, founder of the anti-gay Mission America, and Gary Glenn of the American Family Association (AFA) on Harvey's radio show, which cautioned American companies not to hire gay employees because, well here:

Glenn: What ridiculous folly to suggest that only those individuals who engage in homosexual behavior given all of its severe medical consequences constitute the best and the brightest. It’s not really bright to engage in behavior that puts you at dramatically higher risk of mental illness and substance abuse and AIDS and cancer and hepatitis, and according to various sources, premature death. So to suggest that engaging in that type of behavior defines someone as the best and brightest, which seems to be the line coming out of corporate America, is just ridiculous.

Harvey: You’re right. And higher rates of domestic violence and unstable relationships. I would not think of a homosexual person as a good employment risk, I just wouldn’t.

The LGBTQ community are not good employees? Hmm, let me think about that for just a moment and oh yes, let's add this comment also from an other AFA radio host, Ed Vitagliano, who said:

"Our perspective here at AFA has been not only a biblical one, we've made this point numerous times, but it is also a physiological, a biological, a natural law perspective. And that perceptive is humankind is divided into male and female and the male and female have different - you know, I don't want to make this a biology lesson - but different organs that are designed for, well, intercourse. And so the fact of the matter is homosexuals can only imitate that and this is the primary reason why the sexually transmitted disease rates and infection rates are so high in, especially, the gay male community. They are abusing their body and they are abusing the nature of the design of the human body."

Nice eh? Lastly, a man of the cloth, a preacher, someone who is supposed to be bound to a higher calling to minister to his fellow man said this:

"Unfortunately, that matters little to homosexual activists bent on legitimizing their lifestyle at the expense of ruining our nation’s morality and killing millions along the way due to the serious health ramifications of homosexuality. The prophet Isaiah was speaking of people like this when he wrote, 'Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!' (Is. 5:20).

"Everything in the homosexual culture has been turned upside down, and the men and women who fall into this lifestyle, for whatever reasons, are subject to every sort of evil. They are dying of terrible diseases in record numbers, and still many refuse to admit or even recognize what it is that’s killing them. This is the crisis of our time. It’s the very face of evil. From the college campus to the media centers of New York and Hollywood, people who should know better are buying into an agenda that could destroy us, and they’re doing it in a big way." - Lou Sheldon, head of the Traditional Values Coalition.

Let me address these remarks by a contrast and compare to the start of my column in reference to talking about Black Americans.

I cited the example of Dr. Drew whose discovery of plasma has saved millions of lives over the years. Thus, the perceptions of that politician were obviously ignorant and rooted in a biased common belief, partly advanced by religious conservatives who oft times used the bible as a justification for their peculiar attitudes and prejudices. Of course this journalist wonders what he'd make of a Harvard educated, constitutional lawyer and the product of an interracial marriage occupying the Oval Office?

But, lets talk about the LGBTQ community shall we? Here is an absolute example of irony that I find highly amusing. Every living person who uses any e-mail program to communicate with other human beings around the planet does so by using the direct lineal descendant of a program written by Eric Paul Allman.

Not a name you recognise? Most likely unless you are a serious student of the IT world or a computer geek you probably would not. Eric Allman is an American computer programmer who developed sendmail and its precursor delivermail in the late 1970s and early 1980s at UC Berkeley.

From Wikipedia:

Sendmail is a general purpose internetwork email routing facility that supports many kinds of mail-transfer and -delivery methods, including the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) used for email transport over the Internet.

A descendant of the delivermail program written by Eric Allman, Sendmail is a well-known project of the free and open source software and Unix communities, and has spread both as free software and proprietary software.

Allman, who is openly gay, lives in Berkeley, California with his partner of more than 30 years, Marshall Kirk McKusick. McKusick is a lead developer of BSD; the two first met in graduate school. Allman is quoted as having remarked;

"There is some sort of perverse pleasure in knowing that it's basically impossible to send a piece of hate mail through the Internet without its being touched by a gay program. That's kind of funny."

I guess I don't need to point out the obvious do I?

What Americans are seeing now with the demonising of the society's LGBTQ community is yet another reoccurring episode of bigotry foisted on their society by narrow minded folks whose religious dogma literally prevents them from seeing how ludicrous their pronouncements and remarks truly are.

A Black American invents something that saves lives during a time when it was acceptable to call him a Nigger. Conversely, a Gay American is instrumental in inventing a means by which the entire planet can communicate on a scale and at a speed that was once unthinkable, and it's okay to call him a diseased carrying homo who is not worthy of being employed.

Americans truly have no sense of irony.