Judd Deere is deputy press secretary for President Trump. And now, thanks to liberal media outlets, he’s persona non grata in Washington’s gay community.
It started with a Buzzfeed profile, provocatively entitled “This Trump Spokesperson Is Gay — And He Doesn’t Care If That Makes The Left Mad.” The piece’s bias and assumptions about the Trump administration were obvious from the get-go: The subheading describes Deere as the man who “speak[s] for the president who pushes anti-LGBTQ policies.” This ignores the reality that Trump is the most pro-gay president in American history.
Still, at times, the profile is interesting and compelling, painting a fascinating contrast between Deere’s personal life as a gay man and his work in the White House and between the openness and acceptance he’s experienced behind the scenes against the contentious debate over LGBT issues in which the administration has been emerged.
But the Buzzfeed article paints Deere and gay Republicans more broadly as traitors, who leaped at the opportunity to grovel and shill for conservatives, selling out as useful homosexuals and embracing an anti-LGBT agenda. The so-called journalist, Dominic Holden, writes:
This is the “tolerant” liberal media’s narrative: Deere is a Republican, so he’s a lapdog — on a “retractable leash” — who has sold himself out. Erased from this supposedly progressive narrative is the fact that gay people are individuals, fully capable of thinking for themselves and breaking with the liberal hive mind.
The Buzzfeed piece ridicules Deere’s statement that “the president opposes discrimination and hates violence, all of that, in any form,” mocking Deere’s stated support for controversial Trump policies such as the transgender military ban (as if there were a clear equivalence between being gay and being transgender) or opposition to the sweeping, expansive Equality Act that goes far beyond gay rights. It accuses gay Republicans of “cognitive dissonance” and “sweeping [bigotry] under the rug.”
The deep complexity of the many of these issues is dismissed out of hand. The idea that gay people could believe in mutual tolerance or conscience rights, let alone the religious freedom of those who believe homosexuality to be wrong, is dismissed as inherently disordered. So is the capacity of gay people for individual reasoning that goes beyond sexual preference.
And the insanity didn’t stop there. The left-wing website Queerty joined in on the pile-on, with an even more inflammatory and unfair article. They egregiously misquote Deere in the very headline: “Trump’s gay press secretary on promoting anti-LGBTQ policies: ‘It just doesn’t matter to me’.” Anyone who reads the actual interview knows this isn’t what he said, but the progressive media machine just can’t accept gay people breaking with the far left: They’ve got too much financial skin in the game for that.
The left-wing internet pile-on that ensued in the aftermath of the Buzzfeed profile’s publication was even worse. Take this tweet by a gay Democrat staffer, for example, which calls for people to literally harass gay Republicans and received thousands of likes and shares:
Attn DC gays: If any of you see this man out at a gay bar, tell him he is not welcome.
You don’t get to work to oppress the LGBTQ community in your day job and then enjoy the nightlife the LGBTQ community has fought for.
https://t.co/GvdMZolUwb— Michael Beyer (@michbeyer) July 1, 2019
Of course, the left-wing media’s coverage and the irate Twitter mob’s hysteria are not representative of all Democrats or even all left-leaning gay people. But they do serve to show that intolerance is corrupting many on the activist Left, even though bigotry is what they’re supposed to think they’re fighting.
