..."build the Keystone pipeline. For the gays’ sake."

[RiverLover]

You can't make this stuff up.

How Canadian Oilmen Pinkwash the Keystone Pipeline
12/28/14

How proponents of Keystone XL cynically exploit LGBT people:

What do you get when you cross an oil company with gay rights?

Mostly, an epic fail. But also a peek inside a vast (or not so vast) right-wing conspiracy seeking to develop the Canadian tar sands and build the Keystone pipeline.

Case in point: opechatesgays.com, a website and social media presence to remind us that OPEC countries treat gays badly, but Canada treats them well. Therefore, we should—you guessed it—develop the Canadian tar sands and build the Keystone pipeline. For the gays’ sake.

Even if the campaign weren’t so clumsily executed, it would still be a dubious proposition. As groups like Queers for the Climate have pointed out, the same people who oppose LGBT equality also tend to oppose environmental protections.

Moreover, only the most narrow-minded gay people base their decisions solely on what’s good for the gays. Campaigns like opechatesgays.com assume that LGBT people are an interest group with only one interest: their own.

This, roughly, is what the critic Jasbir Puar has called “homonationalism”: the idea that gay identity is like a national or tribal identity. What’s good for the gays is good, period.

As Puar further pointed out, this notion of a global gay identity is easily manipulated. Opechatesgays is one example. So are the cynical statements of American conservatives condemning Iran’s appalling human rights record when it comes to LGBT people. The same people opposing employment protections for gays here at home suddenly wave the rainbow flag when it comes to criticizing Iran.

Opechatesgays.com is also an example of “pinkwashing”: the attempt to use a country’s treatment of LGBT people as propaganda....

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/28/how-canadian-oilmen-pinkwash-the-keystone-pipeline.html

[jmowreader]

1. Canada might treat gays well...

but Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska don't.

[TexasTowelie]

2. Keystone XL:

Giving a whole new meaning to laying pipe.

[Bluenorthwest]

3. I don't care for the term 'Pinkwashing' applied to LGBT issues and let me tell you why

The term 'Pinkwashing' was coined as a criticism of corporations using breast cancer awareness and the Komen foundation as cover for corporate misdeeds. The term is a play on the term 'whitewashing' a word in common use to mean 'to cover flaws' or 'to hide the facts'. Pinkwashing was clever in the original use because Pink is the signature color of the Komen foundation. When applied to LGBT issues that cleverness is replaced by a history of fascists and bigots using the color pink to identify and mock gay people. To speak of the misuse of LGBT issues to serve a corporate agenda there is no reason not to simply say 'whitewashing'.
Whitewashing is the term used to mean whitewashing anytime it is not about LGBT people. Then suddenly it's Pink.
I don't care for it at all.