Such a pleasure
Nancy Kelley’s “Ah the joys of throwing women and gay men under the bus chatting on Al Jazeera” tweet really isn’t winning her many friends except maybe in Qatar.
Replies of course are turned off.
Really not many friends at all, in fact I haven’t seen one single friend.
At the very least it’s an extraordinarily tone deaf thing for the head of a supposedly LGB charity to do. Appearing on a mouthpiece of such a regime that is. It certainly strengthens the LGBAlliance hand in their court case by giving them an example to point to as to why it is so necessary that they can represent and promote different voices and values compared other similarly placed charities.
At worst of course it was just stark raving bonkers thing to do.
She couldn’t do a better job of destroying Stonewall’s reputation if she were a stooge planted by Russia, just as Trump destroyed the reputation of the US presidency during his tenure.
I’m not sure that I can wholly join in on the ‘appearing on Al Jazeera is automatically bad’ thing. I know they are funded by Qatar, yet they have done solid journalistic work on many subjects. The test of their potential bias on this subject will be the fairness of their reporting on it, and in their acceptance of speakers of the opposite point of view.
Well, nobody said automatically bad, and I’ve drawn on AJ’s reporting more than once in the past, but Nancy Kelley schmoozing with Christine Burns about how loathsome lesbian feminists are isn’t reporting, and since Kelley is CEO of Stonewall, it is relevant that AJ gets funding from a regime that views LG people as criminals deserving execution.
I think this wording tells a lot about the arguments in favor of trans identities. Atheists deal with bad arguments for God; skeptics deal with bad arguments for psychic powers; medical experts deal with bad arguments for avoiding vaccinations. There’s no uniform need to insist that those are bad faith arguments given by people who know better, but intend to deceive. They can all address the reasons for and against those beliefs directly, attacking the ideas, rather than the person.
Going after the character of the believers signifies weak arguments. “You are in rebellion against God.” “You don’t want to question your narrow, materialistic adherence to the hegemonic establishment.” “You want to control people.” “You just hate those who don’t conform.”
Those aren’t good faith OR bad faith arguments, because it can be argued that they’re not arguments at all.
Sastra, perfection.
As to AJ, I agree that it often does very good reporting often filling in the gaps left by omission in our local media when it comes to ME affairs. But yes, I would have expected anyone from Stonewall to have asked the Q about the treatment of gays in Qatar. But then again, Stonewall has far more in common with the Qatari regime than it does with the L and the G.