Matt Yglesias and Andrew Sullivan are pretty convinced that gays are the new Jews. They don’t offer much by way of evidence or argumentation, just assertion with a quote or two dangled. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong. I think there’s some obvious parallels and some less than obvious ones. But if you’re going to make the sweeping assertion that vast swaths of American society have projected their anti-Semitism onto gays, it might require making a bit more of an effort (particularly since they take it as a given that these people were anti-Semites to begin with).

Marx wrote at length about the Jewish Problem. Where is the equivalent on the right, complaining about the Gay Prooblem? Anti-Semitism’s historical roots are ancient and enormous. Five minutes ago, Andrew was arguing that gays were the new blacks, now they’re the Jews. Which is it?

Some other problems: Central to the anti-Semitic narrative is the Jews’ longevity as an intact people. There’s no enduring gay tribe, is there? Can you simply swap out the stereotype of Jews as financiers and predators of capital in favor of the stereotype of gays as interior decorators and hair-dressers and have anything similar to anti-Semitism? Is there a gay diaspora? I’ve heard the argument that homosexuality behaves like a religion, does this mean that Yglesias and Sullivan buy into it? Or do they want to claim all the benefits of playing this particularly powerful bigotry card without carrying any of the burdens of the analogy?

Again, I think there’s some meat to the analogy, but it’s not nearly so clear cut and not nearly so one-sided. One could argue that gays benefit enormously from their status as the new Jews too. At least that’s what Rick argued in NR six years ago in “The Gay Moment.” An excerpt:

There have been two previous Moments in the 20th century. Irish Catholics had one from about 1900 to World War II; Jews followed them, until yesterday. The Irish Moment crystallized around athletes, actors, pols, and cops-tough guys you liked. A typical figure was Fr. Francis P. Duffy, chaplain of the 165th Infantry (“The Fighting Irish”) in World War I. There is a statue of him in Times Square. He grips a Bible; he could knock your block off; he is smiling. The Jewish Moment threw up comics, writers, and intellectuals-wise guys you liked. A typical figure was Saul Bellow, whose style was criticized, when he first appeared, as “Yinglish.” But this was in fact its allure, rattling like an express subway train from con men to Nietzsche.
These Moments are over. Here and there you can find stragglers-Irish bond traders in dark downtown restaurants, knocking back scotches and insulting one another and themselves; Jewish psychoanalysts, empathic, critical, and neurotic as their patients. But no one cares. They have lost the ear of America. John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in Beyond the Melting Pot, was not the culmination of the Irish Moment, but its tombstone. When did Jews vanish? When Woody Allen married Soon-Yi? When Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated? No matter, they are gone. Jackie Mason tends the cemetery.
What are the common traits of groups in their Moments? Irish, Jews, and gays all have high verbal skills-essential for attracting attention, stimulating and entertaining the national audience. A group in its Moment is one to which, as Arthur Miller put it, attention must be paid. The verbalists occupied similarly oblique positions-accepted enough to be comprehensible, still remote enough to be piquant.
Each group also deployed what political scientist Kenneth Minogue called “suffering situations,” to elicit sympathy and induce guilt. Irish, Jews, and gays all experienced varying degrees of hatred here which, as soon as it began to diminish, they cherished and used to manipulate their more numerous neighbors. For each group, a great disaster became the shorthand image of their suffering-the Famine, the Holocaust, AIDS. These crises, though horrific, are strictly speaking irrelevant to their problems in America, since the first two happened elsewhere and the third was self-inflicted. But during a Moment no one can make this point; after a Moment passes, nobody bothers to try.
A friend hearing me explain the theory of Moments wondered what it meant that the first two groups were religions, while the third is a sexuality. A good point, though gayness in the Gay Moment has many qualities of a religion. Gaydom today is a faith-based community. The central tenet of the faith is a creation myth, about how gays got that way. The orthodox belief is that any man or woman self-defined as gay was gay from birth or infancy; he or she “always knew it.” For many gays this describes both their belief and their reality; for many others this is a subjective feeling only, and will one day be recognized as such, though that day won’t come any time soon. Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America, is a rare gay figure who has entertained heresy: In one interview he expressed the belief that everyone, gay and not, was “traumatized” into his sexuality. He used a lurid verb, but correctly referred to a process. Most of us are born with many paths open; the great majority take the hetero highway; some go here and there. But there are more scenarios available-and will and chance play a larger role in the outcome-than we now imagine.