MSNBC Panel Members Find 'Disturbing Level' of Gay Rights Interest in 'Targeting People'

On the Friday, April 18, All In show, during a discussion of the firing of former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich for simply donating to a political campaign opposing same-sex marriage, guest Richard Kim of the far left The Nation magazine intoned that he found it "disturbing" that gay activist friends of his have expressed interest in "targeting" more people who have made similar donations, and who have declared they should "find out where they live." Kim:

Here's a disturbing thing. I did ask some of my gay activist friends, I was like, "Look, here's a list; 6,500 people gave the same amount that he did or more in California. Should we go down the list and sort of start targeting all these people?" And I asked this facetiously, and people were like, "Let's do it. Let's find out where those people live. It's all-" To me, that's a disturbing level of targeting people.

Hayes, who had earlier expressed reservations about Eich's firing, exclaimed, "Yes," to Kim's view that such talk was "disturbing."

As he brought up the discussion, the MSNBC host seemed skeptical of the former Mozilla CEO's firing: "And there was part of me that did not know how to feel about how this whole thing unfolded."

A bit later, as panel member and MSNBC host Karen Finney defended the practice of pressuring company heads about their political views, Hayes brought up President Obama's previous history of opposing same-sex marriage. Hayes: "Barack Obama in 2008 was opposed to marriage equality."

Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Friday, April 18, All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC, with critical portions in bold:

CHRIS HAYES: So here's the other interesting part of this, and I want to use this to segue to the Brendan Eich story because what you hear and see here are changing social norms, right? It is legal in South Carolina to fire someone because they're gay. Increasingly, that is not viewed as socially acceptable, right? And rightly so. We agree everyone at the table agrees that is wrong.

But, now, there's also social norms about whether it is socially acceptable to have the belief that gay folks can't get married or to oppose gay equality. And this came to a head in the tale of Brendan Eich, who was the CEO of the firm, Mozilla, which makes a very popular Web browser. People found out that he had given a contribution to the wrong side in Prop 8, which was the anti-equality side. It was in a public record.

And there was a campaign that basically got rid of him, basically saying this is an unacceptable view for the CEO of a major firm to have. And there was part of me that did not know how to feel about how this whole thing unfolded. What was your thinking?

RICHARD KIM, THE NATION: Yeah, so I, first of all, say I don't think anybody's rights were violated.

KIM: Right, exactly, exactly. I do, on the level of proportion, question this. So this guy gave one $1,000 donation six years ago to a campaign that 7 million Californians voted for, that 6,500 people gave a donation at his level or higher. Mozilla has an anti-gay discrimination policy. He had no intent to change that. Marriage in California is settled law.

So there's a question of whether or not all the sort of fury targeted at him and this one sort of, you know, attempt to oust him is in proportion to any threat that he represents to gay people in the future.

CATHY HENNA, LGBT ACTIVIST: It's somehow, it's how the culture works, too. This is a major tech company in Northern California, and, you know, as we were talking about before, you know, this is not just about gay people anymore. This is about allies. I mean, the second this went on social media, on Facebook, on Twitter, people just find this unacceptable. It's no longer acceptable to be anti-gay.

HAYES: But did they find it unacceptable, there was a weird kind of advertising of one's own enlightenment that this was part of. You know what I mean? It felt to me a little bit like, "I can like this, I can get behind this because this is a kind of, it's no skin off my back, you know? Like, I don't care who the CEO of Mozilla is." And this shows -- that's what conservatives were saying, right? Conservatives were saying that this is basically hounding people, this is totally "il-liberal."

HENNA: (INAUDIBLE) -to say that when it works for them because what their big thing is, "Oh, it's about the free market." Well, in this case it was the free market. People are making decisions about what they do and what they buy and what the organizations and the companies they support and the decisions they make as consumers voting with their wallets based on the leadership of those companies.

KAREN FINNEY, MSNBC HOST: It's the little bit of power that we have as consumers. And you hear Karl Rove and the right wing. What do they always say about the companies that give to right-wing causes. We don't want to have to publish our names. They're afraid of a backlash. Well, guess what: I can decide I don't want to spend my money at, with your company if I don't approve how you spend that money. I can decide-

KIM: Here's a disturbing thing. I did ask some of my gay activist friends, I was like, "Look, here's a list; 6,500 people gave the same amount that he did or more in California. Should we go down the list and sort of start targeting all these people?" And I asked this facetiously, and people were like, "Let's do it. Let's find out where those people live. It's all-" To me, that's a disturbing level-

FINNEY: But is part of it because Prop 18 is so, it became such a heated issue in this country, and it sort of became, I think, and it is a sort of either you're on the right side or the wrong side, and, ironically, even the lawyer in the case has been evolving as he's planning his daughter's wedding.

From The Poisoned Stream – this is by no means all the info on Rohm:

Hitler’s Chosen Associates

Igra writes, “Just as the Kaiser had done in pre-war Germany, Hitler gathered homosexuals around him. The moral pervert, Captain Ernst Rohm, who gave Hitler his first start and helped more than any other person to bring him to power, was his intimate friend for more than fourteen years. When the private doings of the National Socialist leaders in his immediate entourage became known throughout Germany and even abroad, Hitler saw that his own career was in peril. He tried to prove an alibi by getting rid of a number of his friends in the horrible ‘blood purge’ of June 30, 1934. But a large number of sex perverts still remained in Hitler’s entourage and continued to rule Germany, as they did in the Kaiser’s time.

* * *

William Shirer on Nazi Homosexuals

Upon his death on December 28, 1993 William Shirer was glowingly eulogized by the New York Times News Service and the Associated Press. His classic Nazi history, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, (Fawcett Crest, 1960) was hailed upon its release as “One of the most important works of history of our time,” by The New York Times and “Superb History” by the Chicago Tribune. The following quotes are excerpted from Shirer’s 1960 paperback edition:

Shirer writes,

There were two members of this insignificant [Nazi] party who deserve mention at this point; both were to prove important in the rise of Hitler...Captain Ernst Rohm...had joined the party before Hitler...A tough, ruthless driving man — albeit, like so many of the early Nazis, a homosexual—he helped organize the first Nazi strong-arm squads which grew into the SA.... Dietrich Eckart...often called the spiritual founder of National Socialism...became a close advisor to [Hitler]... introducing him to...such future aides as Rudolf Hess [also homosexual](p. 64f.).

* * *

Igra continues: “The vices of Captain Rohm, commander of the storm troops, with three million men under his control, were a matter of world-wide knowledge and comment. Baldur von Schirach, Reich Leader of the Youth from the time of Hitler’s accession to power until 1939, was arrested by the police for perverse sexual practices and liberated on the intervention of Hitler, who soon afterwards made him leader of the Hitler Youth. Among the S.S. and S.A. group-leaders and gauleiters the more outstanding criminals in this matter were Edmond Heines, S.A. group-leader at Breslau, Julius Streicher, gauleiter of the Nuremberg district, and Kube of the Frankfort-on-Oder district. Heydrich, Deputy Chief of the Gestapo, was dismissed from the Navy for immoral sexual conduct. This criminal list might be lengthened to fill many pages.

On Ernst Rohm and the Early SA

Excerpted from German journalist Heinz Hohne’s The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS (Ballentine Books, 1969), praised by The New York Times Book Review as “A monumental achievement.”

[EXCERPT] In Ernst Rohm, the new Chief of Staff of the SA, Hitler was keeping a man who was running the SA through a ring of blatant homosexuals and turning the National-Socialist revolutionary army into a pervert’s playground.

Rohm had never made any secret of his tendencies saying ‘I admit straightaway that I do not belong to the goody-goodies, and have no desire to do so.’ Any attempt by the State ‘to regulate human instincts by law or divert them into other channels’ he countered with a quotation from Richard Wagner: ‘Folly, folly, everywhere folly.” He rejected with scorn protests by leading National-Socialists. He told the Berlin Dr. Heinsoth, for instance: ‘I am quarreling violently with that blockhead moralist Alfred Rosenberg. His articles are aimed primarily at me since I have never made any mystery of my views. That is obvious since in my case ‘people’ have had to get used to these criminal goings-on in National Socialist circles.

Rohm’s abnormal leanings had been common knowledge since he had taken a Berlin gigolo, Herman Siegesemund, to court for theft of a suitcase. On the evening of 13 January 1925 Rohm had invited Siegesmund to a glass of beer in the Berlin Marienkasino followed by the usual sequel to such an encounter. Siegesmund stated in evidence: ‘While we were sitting fully clothed in the room of the hotel, Herr Rohm took a cigarette case from his pocket; I noticed that a slip of paper fell out and I picked it up. About half an hour later I left the hotel room because Herr Rohm expected me to take part in a form of sexual intercourse which was abhorrent to me and to which I would not agree. Out in the street I found that the slip of paper which I had taken while up in the room was a luggage ticket belonging to Herr Rohm.’ Siegesmund collected the suitcase, which proved to contain a bundle of compromising letters.

Hitler knew all about Rohm’s tendencies but insisted they were his own affair. When Rohm took on his job as Chief of Staff of the SA, Hitler, who was still officially head of the SA, issued a parting order that the SA was ‘not a girl’s finishing school, but a tough fighting formation.’ Complaints about people’s private habits he rejected ‘indignantly and on principle’ as ‘supposition’ and ‘entirely private matters.’

Rohm’s amorous adventures, however, were anything but ‘an entirely private matter.’ He used the SA for ends other than the purely political. SA contact men kept their Chief of Staff supplied with suitable partners, and at the first sign of infidelity on the part of a Rohm favorite, he would be bludgeoned down by one of the SA mobile squads. The head pimp was a shop assistant named Peter Granninger, who had been one of Rohm’s partners...and was now given cover in the SA Intelligence Section. For a monthly salary of 200 marks he kept Rohm supplied with new friends, his main hunting ground

Germany’s National Vice Revisited being Geisela High School Munich; from this school he recruited no fewer than eleven boys, whom he first tried out and then took to Rohm. Meanwhile, some of Rohm’s more dubious friends had occupied senior SA positions left vacant as a result of the Stennes revolt.

The general meeting-point for the Granninger circle and the SA homosexuals was Rohm’s reserved table in the Bratwurstglockl, Munich. The proprietor, Karl Zehnter, was a homosexual himself whom Granninger had ‘assisted’ at his home. Another homosexual and longstanding habitue of Rohm’s table was the new Berlin Commander, Edmund Heines....Karl Ernst, the new SA Chief of Staff, Berlin, had been a partner of Captain Rohrbein, ex-Frontbahn, who had also been seen with Rohm in Berlin homosexual dives such as the Kleist-Kasino and Silhouette. This ring of perverted SA commanders seemed unbreakable (Hohne:81f.). [END EXCERPT]

The facts cited above relating to Rohm are taken primarily from the Munchner Post, 30 June, 1931. The facts relating to the SA are taken from the “Judgment of the Criminal Division of the Munich Civil Court,” November, 1934, case against Peter Granninger and others, Central Archives, Microfilm 17.

I would like to add an additional segment on Rohm and the early Nazis. The following is particularly significant because it is written by Adolf Brandt. As founder of the Community of the Elite and publisher of Der Eigene, the world’s first openly homosexual magazine, Brandt was one of the most influential homosexuals in Germany and is thus an especially important witness. Note his reference to the Teutons.

Adolf Brandt on Homosexuality in the Nazi Party

This excerpt from Brandt’s writings is from Homosexuality and Male Bonding in Pre-Nazi Germany (Haworth Press 1991), by Harry Oosterhuis and Hubert Kennedy.

[EXCERPT] Men such as Captain Rohm, are, to our knowledge, no rarity at all in the National Socialist Party. It rather teems there with homosexuals of all kinds. And the joy of man in man, which has been slandered in their papers so often as an oriental vice although the Edda frankly extols it as the highest virtue of the Teutons, blossoms around their campfires and is cultivated and fostered by them in a way done in no other male union that is reared on party politics.

The threatened hanging on the gallows, with which they allege they want to exterminate homosexuals, is therefore only a horrible gesture that is supposed to make stupid people believe that the Hitler people, in the matter of male-to-male inclinations, are all as innocent as pigeons and pure as angels, just like the pious members of the Christian Society of the Virgin...The public threat against the homosexuals has in the meantime not frightened any youth-friend or man-friend into deserting this party. One knows perfectly well that all those public threats are only paper masks (Oosterhuis and Kennedy:236f.). [END EXCERPT]

Download the book: http://www.defendthefamily.com/pfrc/showproducts.php

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.