[...] America's religious conservatives/extremists [...] argue that the LGBT community is so tiny – just 9 million Americans, according to the Williams Institute – that our calls for civil rights protections and full civil equality shouldn't be taken seriously. Rights, they implicitly assert, should be awarded only to minority communities that have attained some sort of critical mass. [....]
This is a curious argument coming from the same people – evangelical Christians – who seem to regard Israel as the 51st state in our union. There may be "just" 9 million LGBT Americans – but that number that is greater than the entire population of Israel (7 million). And if we are "just" 3.8% of the US population, the LGBT community – a figure that includes hundreds of thousands of LGBT Jews – is still more than twice the size of the total Jewish community in the United States (1.4% of the population), to say nothing of the Mormon community (1.7%).
All of which would be a neat little argument if Greater Israel nonsense were to Jewish Americans what same-sex marriage and the repeal of DADT is to gay Americans. Slight problem with that.
Evangelical and evangelical-vote-seeking politicians do not have the stance on Israel they do because they want Jewish votes. I mean, sure, they want all the votes they can get, but it doesn't add up. Jews are not voting for a Santorum, a Huckabee. Even the last remaining American Jews under 80 who care about Israel don't want for Israel what those politicians want for Israel, and tend to want the opposite as they do for America (reference is to the Rick Perry video, which Flavia is criticizing as a Christian, but I can't imagine too many Jews had a more favorable take). And what's the point of speculating about how many Jewish Americans are LGBT? Even the vast majority of American Jews who are straight and cisgender, are voting Democrat. It's not as if LGBT Jews are so conflicted in the voting booth, feeling that as Jews they must pull the lever for Santorum, but their sexual orientation or gender identity gets in the way. And last I checked, Republicans aren't even claiming their Israel stuff is primarily about honoring the wishes of America's Jews. Isn't it about allies in the War on Terror, Israel as "Western," and all that Bible stuff?
Put another way: there's no cabal above Zabars maneuvering Santorum via puppet strings. We would not let Santorum that near the really good (so runny and delicious I suspect it has to be raw-milk, whatever claims to the contrary the label bears; yes, intentional) Camembert.
And are we really to believe that Republicans are competing against one another - and the primaries are Savage's concern here - to please Israelis? What does the size of Israel's population have to do with Republican pandering? It's questionable that they're primarily pandering to American Jews when discussing Israel, but preposterous that their target is Israeli Jews.
It could be that Savage is pandering to the British left (or much of it, not all), in choosing here, yet rarely elsewhere - and I've read/listened to a whole lot of Savage - to allude to U.S. Israel policy. It's a kind of roundabout quasi-anti-Semitism, I suppose, all the assumptions his claims here rely on, and I doubt Savage is even aware of it. Whatever the case, the concern is that "Jews" are now this stand-in for whatever the opposite is of progressive. Jews can of course be bigots, but it would be a tough case to make that Jews are more racist against African-Americans, more homophobic, than average. Yet, such are the perks of being a long-preferred Other. Whatever point one is trying to make, if one wishes to raise the blood pressure of one's (vast-majority-non-Jewish) audience, to excite them about an issue at hand, one may toss in something about Jews.
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