IN: Andrew Michael Sullivan (born 10 August 1963) is an English-born American author, editor, and blogger. Sullivan is a conservative political commentator, a former editor of The New Republic, and the author or editor of six books. He was a pioneer of the political blog, starting his in 2000. He eventually moved his blog to various publishing platforms, including Time, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and finally an independent subscription-based format.

Sullivan, like Marshall Kirk, Hunter Madsen, and Bruce Bawer, has been described by Urvashi Vaid as a proponent of "legitimation", seeing the objective of the gay rights movement as being "mainstreaming gay and lesbian people" rather than "radical social change". Sullivan wrote the first major article in the United States advocating for gay people to be given the right to marry, published in The New Republic in 1989. Many gay rights organisations attacked him for the stance at the time. Many on "the gay left" believed that he was promoting "assimilation" into "straight culture", when the aim of most at that time was to alter codes of sexuality and society as a whole, rather than fitting gays into it. However, his arguments eventually became widely accepted and formed the basis of the modern movement to allow same-sex marriage. In the wake of the United States Supreme Court rulings on same-sex marriage in 2013 (Hollingsworth v. Perry and United States v. Windsor), New York Times op-ed columnist Ross Douthat suggested that Sullivan might be the most influential political writer of his generation, writing, "No intellectual that I can think of, writing on a fraught and controversial topic, has seen their once-crankish, outlandish-seeming idea become the conventional wisdom so quickly, and be instantantiated so rapidly in law and custom." Sullivan opposes hate crime laws, arguing that they undermine freedom of speech and equal protection. He also opposes the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, arguing that it would "not make much of a difference" and that the "gay rights establishment" was wrong to oppose a version of the bill that did not include protections for gender identity. Sullivan opposed calls to remove Brendan Eich as CEO of Mozilla and argued that "old-fashioned liberalism brought gay equality to America far, far faster than identity politics leftism." In 2006, Sullivan was named as an LGBT History Month icon.
QUESTION: Was Sullivan ever hurt as a result of a hate crime?
IN: Johanna "Hannah" Arendt (; German: ['a:R@nt]; 14 October 1906 - 4 December 1975) was a German-born American political theorist. Her eighteen books and numerous articles, on topics ranging from totalitarianism to epistemology, had a lasting influence on political theory. Arendt is widely considered one of the most important political philosophers of the twentieth century. As a Jew, Arendt chose to leave Nazi Germany in 1933, and lived in Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, and France before escaping to the United States in 1941 via Portugal.

In her reporting of the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial for The New Yorker, which evolved into Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), she coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe the phenomenon of Eichmann. She examined the question of whether evil is radical or simply a function of thoughtlessness, a tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without a critical evaluation of the consequences of their actions. She was sharply critical of the way the trial was conducted in Israel. She also was critical of the way that some Jewish leaders, notably M. C. Rumkowski, acted during the Holocaust. This caused a considerable controversy and even animosity toward Arendt in the Jewish community. Her friend Gershom Scholem, a major scholar of Jewish mysticism, broke off relations with her. Arendt was criticized by many Jewish public figures, who charged her with coldness and lack of sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust. Because of this lingering criticism neither this book nor any of her other works were translated into Hebrew, until 1999. This controversy was answered by Hannah Arendt in the book's Postscript. The controversy began by calling attention to the conduct of the Jewish people during the years of the Final Solution, thus following up the question, first raised by the Israeli prosecutor, of whether the Jews could or should have defended themselves. I had dismissed that question as silly and cruel, since it testified to a fatal ignorance of the conditions at the time. It has now been discussed to exhaustion, and the most amazing conclusions have been drawn. The well-known historico-sociological construct of "ghetto mentality"... has been repeatedly dragged in to explain behavior which was not at all confined to the Jewish people and which therefore cannot be explained by specifically Jewish factors... This was the unexpected conclusion certain reviewers chose to draw from the "image" of a book, created by certain interest groups, in which I allegedly had claimed that the Jews had murdered themselves. Arendt ended the book by writing: Just as you Eichmann supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations--as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world--we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.
QUESTION:
What did you find interesting about this?