For some reason, the increasingly progressive 2020 Democratic contenders have resurrected the idea of reparations for slavery, a policy that appeals to the religious need for social justice penance of the contemporary left.
Nevermind the very valid logistical concerns of who actually receives reparations, who pays for them, or how the entity that distributes them ensures that the “right” people get them, let alone the ethics of punishing one group of people for something they did not do and rewarding another group of people for something they did not suffer. None of this matters to the progressive Democratic party, that relies heavily on perpetuating the victim mentality to get votes.
While the recently resurrected discussion of reparations for slavery has a long history, Democratic candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who is rapidly rising in the polls, proffered the idea of another kind of reparations: a Congressional bill to give refunds to “married” LGBT couples who she claims overpaid federal taxes.
She recently tweeted:
It wasn’t until marriage equality became law that gay & lesbian couples could jointly file tax returns—so they paid more in taxes. Our government owes them more than $50M for the years our discriminatory tax code left them out. We must right these wrongs. https://t.co/OZQcfVilSs
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) June 23, 2019
The Daily Caller explains:
Warren’s Refund Equality Act, introduced June 20, would retroactively apply “married-filing jointly” status — along with refunding the amount overpaid — to same sex couples who were married in states where such unions were recognized prior to the federal government doing so in 2013.
“The federal government forced legally married same-sex couples in Massachusetts to file as individuals and pay more in taxes for almost a decade,” Warren explained. “We need to call out that discrimination and to make it right — Congress should pass the Refund Equality Act immediately.”
According to NBC News, such reparations could run up a tab of $57 million or higher.
Seriously. These people already want the government to subsidize perpetual victimhood, now they’re just kicking it up a notch.
The idea of so-called “gay reparations” was recently defended in a New York Times op-ed, written by Omar G. Encarnación.
The editorial reads, in part:
The New York Police Department apologized last week to the gay community for the 1969 raid of the Stonewall Inn, the fallout of which is widely credited with spurring the contemporary gay rights movement at home and abroad.
Timed to coincide with Stonewall’s 50th anniversary, the statement by Commissioner James P. O’Neill said in part: “The actions taken by the N.Y.P.D. were wrong — plain and simple” and “the actions and the laws were discriminatory and oppressive, and for that, I apologize.”
The apology is the culmination of a decades-old struggle by gay activists for recognition of wrongdoing on the part of the police — one that few activists thought could ever become a reality.
That apology, however, isn’t enough for these people. The editorial continues:
With the surprise apology, the United States has taken its most significant leap yet into “gay reparation,” or policies intended to address the legacy of state-sanctioned repression of homosexuals.
Although relatively new to the United States, gay reparation has been debated and legislated around the world for close to two decades and is a logical progression in the maturation of the gay rights movement.
Having largely secured rights once thought to be virtually unattainable — especially same-sex marriage — gay activists, especially in Western democracies, are turning their attention to addressing the historical legacies of homosexual repression.
In other words, now that same-sex marriage is legal in the United States, these “activists” need to invent a new crisis to protest; a new demand to make. And, of course, the leftists are happy to pick their magical money tree bare to pay for it all.
The idea of gay reparations, whether in the form of Sen. Warren’s tax refund bill or any other, would be a nightmare of logistics at best, and an official, unequivocal capitulation by our nation to the whims of the LGBT mafia at worst.
We knew this insane idea would catch on with the likes of Sen. Warren and the nation’s most ideologically extreme lawmakers. Legislators like her are already trying to “out-woke” each other with bills like this—imagine the havoc if she landed the presidency.
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