Slovak MP, former Interior Minister and head of the Christian Democrats of Slovakia party Vladimír Palko has weighed in on this development with a brief opinion piece published in three languages at La Voce della Slovacchia, a primarily Italian-language news outlet on the Slovak scene. The piece is entitled “Gay marches end in tyranny“. Yes, you read that right.

The homosexual lobby wants to achieve a situation where the homosexual lifestyle is respected by the majority society as something normal and natural.

I’m unsure, myself, what the “homosexual lobby” seeks to achieve in Slovakia. But if it includes this, I support it whole-heartedly. Because what we have in the meanwhile is a situation where it’s considered “normal” and “natural” to hate anyone operating outside the religio-culturally prescribed heterosexual model, and act accordingly toward them.

Palko then explains the “tyranny” he wants his readers to fear is coming, that they might grant him and his cronies more power:

I will mention the example of Judge Andrew McClintock from Sheffield, who lost his judges robes because he did not wish to preside over cases where he would by law have to award guardianship of children to a homosexual couple. Another example is the employee of City Hall in London, Lilian Ladele, who will no longer be able to do her job as wedding registrar, because she had a problem with her conscience in “marrying” homosexual couples.

So, what Palko wants those who read his screed to fear is that government workers will be “tyrannized”. Awwwww! It makes me want to go run right out and give the nearest police officer a great big hug.

As long as issues such as sexual orientation and marriage are to fall under the baneful gaze of states, it should be clear to anyone, Palko included, that the only proper function of the government employees handling them is to simply carry out the law impartially. And if they can’t handle that, fine, let them go out and get into an honest line of work instead.

More than anything else, Keith pushes a sort of meta-strategy for anarchism which aims at pluralism and ecumenicalism and which suggests that all anti-state tendencies ought to unite against the principal enemy of liberty, the state itself, in preference to choosing lesser targets of activist action such as sexism, racism, homophobia and so on. The biggest tent possible, in other words, for the advance of anarchism as anti-statism, absent the baggage of a myriad of other issues.

Of itself, I believe this has great strategic value.

In his posting yesterday, though, Keith unambiguously betrays his own ugly prejudices in a bilious piece entitled “Is Extremism in the Defense of Sodomy No Vice?“:

Do we really attract more people into our ranks by having so many self-hating whites, bearded ladies, cock-ringed queers, or persons of one or another surgically altered “gender identity” in our midst? Is this really something the average rebellious young person wants to be associated with? Could we not actually attract more young rebels into our ranks if all of this stuff was absent? I believe we could.

Suffice it to say this I find this offensive on many levels.

Now, I’m all for Keith’s right to free speech. But I find that I don’t really care about Keith’s strategy.

The anarchist tent may, indeed, need to be bigger in order to achieve strategic goals. But here I see one arguing for a big-tent strategy giddily pushing marginalized groups out of the tent and encouraging others to do the same.

Not only is this a contradiction of the big-tent strategy itself, but it also pushes away all those who sympathize with those marginalized, traditionally hated out-groups. I, for one, am not going to be found standing up for the rights of bigoted assholes to be bigoted assholes, let alone lending them whatever credibility might attach in a given reader’s mind to finding such linked to at my own website.

And so today Keith disappears from my blogroll, and good riddance. For the moment he remains in my RSS reader, since I recognize that there is a fine mind at work in Keith, and one often worth reading, despite what I view as a clear deficit of empathy.

Without substantial work at repentance, Keith will not be welcome at my table, nor in my tent.