Witch Hunt of the Week: Let's Hate Those who are Different

I've been honestly disgusted by the unwarranted media trip through the mud Ganas has taken this past week. It all started with New York Magazine's genuinely informative but sensationalized article about the group. The story's salacious title, Big Love on Staten Island, made reference to this season's new HBO series about polygamy. The article's shameless subheader tantalized readers with tales of "open relationships, little people," and "100 kooky housemates" even though the aticle itself had no actual content about sexual episodes at the commune. Call me crazy, but branding someone's predilection for communal living as "kooky" doesn't qualify as evenhanded journalism last time I checked. And since when was living with someone who is vertically challenged an item of prurient interest? We'd expect more from New York. Wait until they break the story about all the wild left-wing things going on at the Park Slope Food Coop. They'll have the good people of our city on their knees.

In hindsight, unfortunately, I can see that New York was being kind. Their chiding was tame compared with what's been going around in the city's papers since the Jeff Gross shooting. Last time I checked, "open relationships" or even blatant wife swapping (if that were even going on there) didn't qualify as kinky. Perhaps I'm a libertine, but I'd reserve "kinky" for anything sexual involving fecal material, asphyxiation, or electrocution.

What a surprise that the New York Post was morally wounded by what they called the Ganasian lifestyle of "pill-popping and wacky sex sessions," (airing the views of one crazy accused murderer and another disgruntled former member as though they were fact). Who is the Post kidding? This from the newspaper that can't resist running a story about a story about how "stall-sex" isn't just for homosexuals anymore as though it were a news item.

The Staten Island Advance has been pretty fair, actually, perhaps out of superior journalistic ethics, or perhaps because of a home-borough protectiveness. My guess is that it's because, like most of us who live here, they've had some contact with members of Ganas (turns out we're friends with the spouse of a prominent member) and found them to be perfectly normal people who happen to participate in an unorthodox economical and social arrangement.

The New York Times, we're not surprised, was above name calling. Aside from one matter-of-fact reference to "wife-swapping", they told it like it was at Ganas: "The bloodshed has brought unwanted attention to a group of people who have long struggled to show outsiders that they are a civic-minded, environmentally friendly collective of lawyers, doctors, teachers and real estate brokers, not some zany cult of vestigial hippies living on the fringes of the city." Otherwise, they stuck to the attempted murder.

The New York Daily News has fallen somewhere in between, using the word "kinky" but portraying at least a sympathetic portrait of Gross, sensationalizing the murder rather than the commune (fine by us). Oddly, though, the News story is the one that's been taken and rebroadcast all over the Internet by conservative and religious news sites, bloggers, and even a pro gun website. All this attention has meant that Ganas has closed its weekly public meeting, which in turn means Ganas is less like Ganas than it used to be. We have no personal stake in their community, but we do have a major stake in the community as a whole, and as such we find this all very sad.