Amazon.com Conspires Against Gays

Brokeback Mountain, one of the books "banned" from Amazon.com's website. The book is in such high demand that you can buy it used for $.40 plus shipping.

The gay blogosphere is all aflame. In grand style, gay activists roundly condemned Amazon.com for removing gay-related content from its website. Amazon.com was trying to stifle free speech, they moaned. Or maybe the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy snuck in and deleted the books.

Amazon officials blamed the delisting on an error that they said affected more than 57,000 titles that touched on a variety of topics, including Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. (The Register)

But gay activism is all about identity politics, meaning that gays must consider themselves to be oppressed - even when there's not a shred of evidence that oppression is taking place. And what do gay activists turn around and do? They blame everyone and everything in sight, shouting their war cries and mantras: "It's not fair!" "They're all after us!" "We're so oppressed!" "Boycott Amazon.com!"

Some cases in point:

"This doesn't strike me as a glitch," author Kevin Sessums, whose paperback version of Mississippi Sissy was affected by the delisting, told The Wall Street Journal. "Maybe a right-wing troll got into their system, or they have a right wing troll working for them. But the gay blogosphere is afire." (The Register)

Or this:

"By removing gay-related content from its rankings, Amazon has made it so that they do not appear easily in searches and do not appear in book suggestions throughout the site," a blogger for gay rights blog Queerty wrote. (The Register)

Or this:

A separate account by a blogger calling himself Weev claimed the delisting was the result of a CSRF, cross-site request forgery, vulnerability on the Amazon website that forced people to unwittingly flag gay- and lesbian-themed books as inappropriate. (The Register)

Or this:

"What kind of a childish game is this?" [Gore] Vidal said Monday. "Why don't they just burn the books? They'd be better off and it's very visual on television." (AP)

Or this:

The company will no doubt try to [explain itself] without reminding its homophobic customers that it is selling hot man-on-man and woman-on-woman and whoever-on-whoever purple prose for gays to read and do lord knows what else at the same time. Better start working on the statement right now if you hope to put it out anytime next week. (Blog)

So what did these folks do when they found out that Amazon.com's delisting was an error, a glitch? Did they shake their heads and pronounce mea culpas? Did they laugh at their gullibility? Did they apologize to Amazon.com for defamation?

"It isn't fair to say that Amazon is actually censoring books, but you can't help draw the parallels, simply because the same kinds of books are involved," said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, deputy director of the library association's intellectual freedom office. (AP)

No. In true liberal style, they compare Amazon.com's glitch to book banning. And in the true style of identity politics, they neglect to point out that in the last decade, the book that heads the banned book list is Harry Potter - hardly a gay treatise. By the way, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is ranked number 11. (American Library Association)

Gay activists walk a thin line of identity politics here. By snapping and sniping at every perceived offense, they succeed only in demeaning their cause to mere petulance.