Can we talk about stereotypes?

"It's time for you to find someplace new to recruit your henchmen. We're getting back to our business of beauty," says Miss California USA pageant direct Keith Lewis, setting the gay rights cause back at least 20 years with his portrayal of the vicious, catty drama queen stereotype.

Via Townhall, where Greg Hengler says that Lewis is "openly gay," which is a term of art in such a case. I mean, some guys are gay and you'd never know unless they told you. But Lewis? It's like he's emitting a gaydar homing beacon or something.

Gay Patriot notes Lewis's over-the-top bitch act:

Why must he so attack Maggie Gallagher? And why do so many gay lefties use the word "shame" to describe the actions of their ideological adversaries? . . . Why can't these people show some class, some grace, in confronting their adversaries? Why must they adopt so harsh a tone and so vitriolic a vocabulary?"

It's who they are: Angry at the world, externalizing their own unhappiness by projecting it on scapegoats. Lewis's attack on Maggie Gallagher grates because it is a non sequitur. In fact, the whole press conference was a non sequitur, as far as any official business of the Miss Calfornia USA pageant was concerned.

This was Lewis, the preening narcissist, venting his personal rage against someone (Gallagher) he's identified as The Enemy, inflated in his mind as the dehumanized embodiment of his every disappointment and of everyone who has ever disapproved of him.

However, such is the Movement mentality -- if you've ever read Eric Hoffer's The True Believer, you understand -- that all of Lewis's comrades will congratulate him: "Yeah! You sure showed her!" The viciousness is reinforced by this echo-chamber effect.

Meanwhile, well-meaning people will watch the video and say to themselves, "What was that about?"

UPDATE: BTW, if you actually know Maggie Gallagher, you know she's hardly the Evil Hate Monster of left-wing imagination. If it is true -- as Keith Lewis says -- that a large share of the contributions to the National Organization for Marriage goes for Gallagher's salary, benefits and expenses, then that is surely with the knowledge, and perhap by design, of her supporters.

Her organization is a small one, and if she had a larger budget, then a smaller share of the contributions would be required for her salary. (Question: What is David Brock's salary at Media Matters? What is the budget of Media Matters?) John Hawkins of Right Wing News recently interviewed Gallagher:

[L]ook at what they're doing to Carrie. Okay, I mean look at what they're doing to a nice girl. She's a beauty pageant contestant. All she did was say when asked, "Hey I think marriage should be between a man and woman," and they're reacting and dumping on her and trying to destroy her as if she had said something shameful and controversial.
So what we need to learn from Carrie is that they're dumping on people who believe that marriage means a man and a woman because they don't want to debate the consequences of gay marriage. They don't want you to think about what it means when your government adopts a law that says you're like a bigot if you disagree with the government's definition of marriage.

Bingo. The gay left's eruptions of screaming intolerance are not accidental. As I keep trying to explain, the gay-rights movement is egalitarian, not libertarian, and that is an important distinction. Egalitarianism, which aims to re-arrange society so as to produce "social justice," inherently involves coercion, and therefore inevitably requires that the government assume vast power over the lives of the ordinary citizen.

It is this egalitarian appetite for power that produces the "Gay Rights, Gay Rage" reaction that we see in the reaction to Carrie Prejean. Those who don't understand the power dynamic of politics believe that it is possible to reach some compromise with egalitarianism. This belief is a fundmental error.

George Orwell, a socialist, wrote his two great novels, Animal Farm and 1984, after his experiences in the Spanish Civil War awakened him to the dishonesty and viciousness of Soviet communism. (Soviet-trained commissars played a key role in organizing the anti-Falangist resistance in Spain.) But Orwell died at age 46, and never made the next step beyond recognizing the evil of totalitarian tactics to understanding that such tactics are implicit in the egalitarian ideology of socialism.

This is why Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom is so important. Hayek understood that the egalitarian Left's promise of "social justice" is a lie, and that the Left's militant demands on the so-called "issues of the day" are mere ploys, tactical means to the strategic end: Destruction of the free society. If you don't understand this, if you think that the same-sex marriage argument is merely about being nice to gay people, then you have been deceived.

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