This Thursday, October 14, 2010, glam rocker Adam Lambert has a concert scheduled in Malaysia. However, there’s a catch: Homosexuality is a crime in Malaysia, where Muslims are in an uproar because Lambert is a poster-child for gay flamboyance. (The penalty for engaging in homosexual acts in Malaysia can be as much as twenty years in prison.)
Thus, although Malaysian authorities have given Lambert the green light for his coming performance, “Malaysia’s Islamist opposition party…[has] demanded that” it be canceled. And where is the outcry over this? In particular, where is the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) when it appears homosexuals traveling to Malaysia need them most?
They are silent, and because of this they appear to be cowering to a group of anti-gay protestors who live in a country that many Americans couldn’t even find on a map.
And while GLAAD turns a blind eye to criticisms of Lambert that would certainly be labeled “homophobic” if they emanated from a Baptist Church in Alabama or a Presbyterian Church in Arkansas, they are giddy as school kids on the Friday before Spring Break when it comes to attacking Vince Vaughn for saying “electric cars are gay” in the upcoming Universal film, “The Dilemma.”
That’s right: Although Lambert could face two decades of prison in Malaysia if, while there, he lives out the freedoms he enjoys in the U.S.A., GLAAD has their panties in an uproar over the fact that a beloved American comic said something they find distasteful.
Has anyone at GLAAD ever thought of granting others the same degree of free speech and linguistic leeway they themselves expect when members of the gay community write in support of groups like “NAMBLA” or demand to be accepted in matrimony the way heterosexual couples are? Of course they haven’t. Instead, they plan to picket and protest Universal’s “The Dilemma” until any mention of electric cars being “gay” is washed from the slate. (GLAAD’s president, Jarrett Barrios, has actually described Vaughn’s words as “hate speech.”)
So there you have it: In Malaysia, they tell Lambert how to dress when he comes to their country and they put homosexuals in prison for decades at a time, but GLAAD has nothing to say about it. Yet here in the U.S.A., where Lambert is free to be what he wants to be, GLAAD is going apoplectic because a character in a movie uses the word “gay” to describe the fact that electric cars look queer.
Maybe GLAAD hasn’t seen the Chevy Volt.
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