Lazy Ass finds a convenient target in an advocate who sincerely but foolishly wants to consider ‘reparations’ for gay folks in America.

Our friend from Detroit, Jacob Appel, thinks that gays need government reparations and the Detroit Free Press was so enamored of his idea that it published his plea in its April 7 issue. One has a suspicion that they missed a deadline because this story would have more properly been published on April 1, a day well known as April Fool’s Day. This one simply must be a joke…

Appel begins with a heresy that I think should make black Americans infuriated when he lumps the history of homosexuals in America with that of black American’s oppression during slavery. He feels that one day the “struggle” of gays in America will be seen as “unspeakable and inexplicable to my grandchildren as counting a slave as three-fifths of a human being.”…

The truth is, gays haven’t had it much worse than many mistreated minorities have. In fact, the argument could easily be made that Catholics in America have been treated worse than gays ever have. Catholics didn’t start seeing their mistreatment abate until sometime in the mid 1900s after nearly 200 years of hatred, suspicion, and downright oppression against them. (I am not Catholic, by the way.)

Gays have been beaten and killed planet-wide for thousands of years. American Catholics have suffered with some hostility for a century or two, mostly in the South with the KKK after the Civil War. They’re doing fine, they’re almost half of the Supreme Court.

After that display of moral equivalence (or immoral equivalence as the case may be) Appel warms to his point.

What is not so clear to me is whether homosexuals will be adequately compensated for their mistreatment. So while I recognize that other battles remain, I think the time has arrived to place economic reparations for gay and lesbian Americans on the political agenda.

“Economic reparations”? For what? Have homosexuals been denied work? Have they been kept from schools, forced to second-class status, prevented from voting, kept from healthcare entertainment or government? No.

Yes, you dumb fucking cow.

Appel goes on to pad his piece with historical information about past reparations and then tries to shoehorn the “plight” of gays into that history offering a few tried and true canards along the way — such as the gays can’t visit each other in the hospital tale. Appel even amusingly cites deportation laws as anti-homosexual because illegal immigrant gays can’t marry in order to stay in the U.S.A. Now there is a stretch for you. He sums up his list of grievances with a hyperbolic, “all the funds in the national treasury could not make full amends.”

Now we get to his hatred of heterosexual folks:

The only danger in such a proposal is the possibility that a minority of unscrupulous straight people might claim homosexuality in an effort to defraud taxpayers. My instincts tell me that this fear is unfounded. In the first place, we are still at least half a social revolution away from the day when the sort of American who would cheat his gay and lesbian peers, possesses enough confidence in his own sexuality to impersonate a homosexual. Moreover, I am confident that the government could establish an effective system to screen for straight impostors. What an amusing turn of events it would be if the techniques our society once used to ferret out gays and lesbians were someday turned upon straight men and women pretending to be gays and lesbians. Some ironies are priceless.

You’ve got to be kidding, right? The only reason reparations won’t work is because of all those gosh darn “unscrupulous straight people” trying to cash in on the gayperations? Is this guy serious? And what “techniques in our society” is this guy talking about that have so long been used to “ferret out gays and lesbians”? In what land of paranoia is Mr. Appel living?

Anybody who grew up in America like me knows that gays were ferreted out pretty quickly and hammered in junior high school, in high school. That was the reality, that was our culture. It’s not remotely ‘hetero-hatred’ to admit it, you inert donkey. No more than it’s ‘white-hatred’ to slam neo-Nazis.

But you can’t really throw reparations at that. It was obscene, but it’s not something that historic recompense would be a reasonable answer. Gay is like left-handedness, it just happens.

Rank stupidity on the scale of Huston’s, however, takes careerism.