"gay agenda"

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:29 PM -0400 7/6/03, Mark A Mandel wrote:
>On Sun, 6 Jul 2003, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
>
>         [...]
>
>#        It's only homosexuals who are routinely referred to as having
>#an "agenda".  If I talked about the women's agenda, the business
>#agenda, the Black agenda, the Southern agenda, the Jewish agenda, the
>#fundamentalist agenda, the urban agenda, and the like, you'd have some
>#idea what sort of thing I was referring to in each case, but you'd
>#probably feel uncomfortable with the suggestion that there's an
>#ominous monolith of activism at work.
>
>ISTM that the first sentence in this paragraph assumes, or requires, a
>modifier such as "in the mainstream press". Though I can't provide
>citations, I feel fairly sure that I've seen "the Jewish agenda" (or
>"the Zionist agenda", in an attempt to cover against charges of
>antisemitism) in quotations from various media I don't try or want to
>read; and I wouldn't be surprised to find "the fundamentalist agenda" in
>other media whose leanings I find less personally objectionable.
>Similarly (to "Jewish") for "Black" and "women's", although the latter
>may be more often fulminated against as "the feminist agenda".
>
cf. also "the women's lib agenda"

There are 7350 hits on "feminist agenda", many of which involve the
same ironic reclamation Arnold mentioned for "gay agenda".  See, for
example, http://got.net/~elained/

larry