OutRight

Why a Dead Dutch Politician Matters
When Pim Fortuyn was murdered, we may well have lost one of the leaders of the future–no wonder the press doesn’t know how to describe him
by Dale Carpenter

He came closer than any other openly gay person in history to leading an entire country. He was smart, articulate, and charismatic as he defended gay equality against all enemies. In a just world, history would put him on a par with other courageous gay trailblazers like Harvey Milk.

But chances are you never heard of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn (pronounced "For-town") until he was recently assassinated, if then. And chances are what you heard was slanted and defamatory.

Fortuyn, 54, was running as the leader of his own party in Dutch parliamentary elections held on May 15. If his party had captured a sufficient number of seats he could have been the next Prime Minister of the Netherlands, the only country in the world that recognizes full-fledged gay marriage. But as he left a radio interview on May 6, a man shot him dead.

Fortuyn was controversial. In a country with an extremely generous social welfare system, he argued for cutbacks in the bureaucracy. He wanted reforms in bloated and inefficient public services for education and healthcare. He criticized Dutch environmental policy as having "no more substance." He emphasized the need for law-and-order in a country that has the second-highest homicide rate in Western Europe.

At the same time, Fortuyn supported his country’s tolerant social policies on matters like euthanasia, abortion, prostitution, and drug use. He made no apologies for being a gay man, nor, in the Netherlands, did he have to.

But Fortuyn also wanted to hold the line on immigration, and for this he was demonized by legions of the politically correct. He worried that his country’s liberal democratic values were under attack from large numbers of immigrants, a disproportionate number of which have come from repressive and undemocratic Islamic countries.

Islamic clergy in the Netherlands have ridiculed homosexuals as "lower than pigs." Their attitudes toward the role and rights of women have been no less retrograde.

Fortuyn responded by calling Islam a "backward culture" in its attitude toward gays and women. "How can you respect a culture if the woman has to walk several steps behind her man, has to stay in the kitchen and keep her mouth shut?" he asked.

Candid remarks like that caused a stir. Fortuyn was denounced by political elites as an "extreme right-winger" and a racist. Just a day before his assassination, a writer for the New York Times accused him of "modernized fascism." These labels were ceaselessly applied to him by media in the U.S. and Europe even after he was dead. (By contrast, his assassin was described in the media as "an animal rights campaigner" and was remembered by friends in the Times as "a gentle and kind nature lover." Like many extreme environmental and "animal-rights" activists, the assassin apparently loved everything in nature except people.)

Was Fortuyn a racist? Hardly. He bitterly rejected comparisons between himself and the continent’s true neo-fascist and racist, France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen. As his successor for party leadership, Fortuyn chose a black immigrant from the Cape Verde Islands. Another party candidate is Moroccan-born.

As for his criticism of Islam, antigay views should not be exempt from criticism just because they spring from religious faith. Islam is backward when it comes to matters like basic human dignity for gay people. So are other religions, including many Christian sects. But it’s worth noting there is not one predominantly Christian country in the world where homosexual acts are still punishable by death, as they are in Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia.

In his concerns about the ultimate impact of immigration on his country’s institutions, Fortuyn probably exaggerated. The Netherlands already has among the most restrictive immigration policies in Europe, rejecting two of every three would-be immigrants. The American experience has been that wave after wave of immigrants, initially feared as having hostile values and alien religions, have enriched our country.

But if I were Dutch I might see immigration differently. A small nation of 16 million people, the Netherlands is already the second most densely populated country in the world. Almost 10 percent of the country’s population is non-European, the highest rate in Western Europe. Rotterdam, the country’s second-largest city, is now 45 percent foreign-born. Unlike Americans, the Dutch have a long history, culture, and language uniquely their own. Those things are worth preserving.

The most important thing Fortuyn did for gays, however, was simply to stand his own independent ground against vicious criticism. He proved a gay person could support free markets, individual liberty, a rollback in government bureaucracy, and tough anti-crime measures. He identified with the problems of hardworking, middle-class citizens. What’s more, it appeared they increasingly identified with him.

Fortuyn refused to be shoved into a particular politics because of his sexual orientation. He defied standard expectations about what gays should think and say, and so made room for the rest of us to do likewise. It’s not surprising the media was unable to compose a coherent or truthful sentence about him, unaccustomed as they are to seeing a gay person think for himself.

Some people are ennobled by their untimely deaths; when they are gone, we suddenly realize how much promise was lost. James Dean was not a great actor, but he might have been. John Kennedy was not a great president, but he could have been. Pim Fortuyn was not given the chance to show that a homosexual could be entrusted with the stewardship of his nation’s most precious values, but he should have been.