Fred Karger as a Noun

Merriam-Webster defies the term "uncle tom" as follows 

1. a black who is overeager to win the approval of whites (as by obsequious behavior or uncritical acceptance of white values and goals) 

2. a member of low-status group who is overly subservient to or cooperative with authority <the worst floor managers and supervisors by far are women ... Some of them are regular Uncle Toms - Jane Fonda>

The roots of the term are debatably Stowe's, or maybe from minstrel shows, but it matters not - this is the definition that lives in the public consciousness.  I'd like to submit a similar term for the queer community. I vote we strip away Fred Karger as a person, and make im into a noun.

Fred Karger can't be a person.  He simply cannot be a real live flesh-and-blood human being.  Characters like Karger have to be made up. You see, Karger has his bona fides as a gay activist.  Karger founded Californians Against Hate - which has been absolutely positively instrumental in unveiling the Mormon church's involvement in California's Proposition 8, and the National Organization for Marriage's blatant attempt to create and exploit racial divisions in Maine (which is hilarity unto itself, for entirely different reasons). He speaks openly these days of the need of the Republican Party to be "cleansed" of bigotry - and he's right.

He also worked for the President who let tens of thousands of Americans die of AIDS before acknowledging that any such problem existed. 

This is not a matter of the Republican Party's stance on gay rights and Karger's tacit stated support of the party regardless. This is a matter of a party of laissez faire allowing the thought to run to its illogical, immoral conclusion - we help no one, no one, not even to avoid the grave itself. Let the gays die. Let the women die in childbirth. The sick? The elderly? The disabled? Be sick, be old, be cripple, but be it on your own, we shall not help you.  

Karger is old enough to know this, and stayed on that side of the aisle the whole entire time. He was living in California during the AIDS epidemic - and working for the side that wouldn't acknowledge it. What drives a man to work for a leader who lets that man's people die a slow, horrible death? Surely, any such man would be wracked with guilt the rest of his days the moment the error of his ways were made clear. Surely he would at some point see the light, and come crawling home to his people, ready to take on the labors of Hercules to make things right. Maybe this is the reason for Karger's about-face in 2004. Perhaps a rock thrown by God hit him in the head. Perhaps he realized he could no longer carry on aiding and abetting the castigation of his very self, and felt the need to atone for it.  

But this is not a real Saul on the road to Damascus moment for Karger. The scales off the Apostle's eyes, he switched sides and went into the world a new man. But Karger? No, good Fred only gets the mud in his eyes. He chooses to envision a "Clint Eastwood" Republican. But Eastwood isn't really a Republican - he's a libertarian. He said so himself in a 2011 GQ interview. Eastwood, claiming to believe in a politics of leaving everyone alone, surely couldn't - and likely doesn't - support the ultrasound-requiring, gay-marriage-banning, immigrant-hating far right that has so plainly hijacked the Republican Party and taken it for a ride to Fascistville. That seems the sort of place Clint Eastwood would ride into and shoot up. 

But I've gone of track - my argument is that Fred Karger is a noun, and not a person, because his story cannot be real. His reference to a kindred spirit holds no water. The sort of about-face we could potentially view as mayhap private epiphany simply did not happen. And those roots... those awful roots... surely, no subjugated person could ever ever contribute to their own subjugation! That behavior cannot be human. It is the sort of thing you can train an animal to do - to see itself as the natural inferior, to believe that he who holds the food dish holds it by divine right. To hold otherwise, we can speak of no such thing as a human right. If a human can view itself as rightly subjugated, can aid and abet in its subjugation without being viewed as somehow sick or corrupted, then how do we differentiate between the human rightly demanding equality, and the human mistaken regarding his right to that? We can't. We can't have human rights if this is human behavior, because we have to allow for an all-powerful master choosing who is his equal and who is not, since the other party may or may not be correct on the matter. This behavior must be illness or damage of some kind, they cannot be the undertaking of a rational human actor. Therefore, Fred Karger cannot be a real person. He can only be a noun, and I submit the following definition for him: 

1. a gay man who is overeager to further the causes of those who hate gays (as by directly aiding and abetting those who turn a blind eye to the death of scores of homosexuals)

2.  a member of an oppressed group who is overly subservient to the group inflicting that oppression <After driving gays from the party and refusing to seat them at the caucus, you'd have to be a real Fred Karger to be a Republican.>