Scott Weiner at a Pride parade in 2019. Photo: Wiki Commons.

“You stopped being queer the moment you started supporting Israel.”

That sentence, shouted at Democratic California State Senator Scott Wiener during San Francisco Pride this year, tells us far more about the trajectory of today’s activist left than it does about Scott Wiener.

Wiener — a gay Jewish Democrat and one of California’s more prominent champions of LGBTQ rights — was surrounded, berated, and ultimately driven from an event he had attended for decades. Protesters accused him of supporting “genocide,” insisted he no longer belonged, and created conditions that made it unsafe for him to remain.

Anyone who has not watched the footage should do so. It lasts only a few minutes. Watch disagreement become denunciation. Watch how proximity turns to intimidation. Watch an elected official surrounded and forced to leave a Pride event he helped grow.

Then ask a simple question: if this is how activists treat someone as far to the left as Scott Wiener, how would the average mainstream Jewish Democrat experience that same environment?

What happened at San Francisco Pride was not an isolated outburst. It was the public expression of an ideological shift that has been building for years — one reshaping left-wing activist spaces and increasingly influencing the politics around them.

Within that worldview, Israel is no longer simply one foreign policy issue among many. It has become a test of moral legitimacy. Increasingly, that test determines who belongs – not only at Pride events, but within parts of the broader progressive coalition.

For decades, left-of-center politics in America revolved around familiar priorities: healthcare, education, economic opportunity, civil rights, and reproductive freedom. Today, for a growing faction of activists, another question increasingly overrides them all: Where do you stand on Israel?

Some activist organizations have begun codifying that priority. At its 2025 national convention, the Democratic Socialists of America adopted a resolution identifying statements such as affirming Israel’s right to defend itself as conduct that could constitute an expellable offense within the organization.

A foreign policy disagreement has become an ideological purity test.

The irony is difficult to miss.

Around the world, homosexuality remains punishable by death in at least a dozen countries. Same-sex relationships remain criminalized in many dozens more. In multiple countries, entrenched systems of gender apartheid severely restrict women’s rights and autonomy – limiting freedom of movement, education, employment, and even basic legal standing. Billions of Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Baháʼís, Ahmadis, Uyghurs, and others face severe constraints on religious freedom across large parts of the globe. Yet none of these realities has become a defining litmus test for inclusion in activist spaces.

Instead, for a growing segment of the activist left, the defining moral question has become whether someone supports the continued existence of the world’s only Jewish state.

Which brings us back to Scott Wiener.

Wiener is hardly a conservative, or even a centrist, on Israel. Over the past year he has echoed much of the rhetoric embraced by Israel’s harshest counterfactual critics, including embracing the “genocide” libel.

Yet even that was not enough.

Because the dividing line is no longer whether one harshly criticizes Israel – even libelously. The dividing line is whether one accepts the premise that Israel, as a Jewish state, should exist at all.

Wiener does.

And that single point of disagreement was enough to erase everything else – his decades of advocacy, his legislative record, and, according to the protesters surrounding him, even his identity as a gay man.

Again, watch the video. Not the headlines. The footage.

Watch a crowd decide, in real time, that a gay, Jewish, deeply progressive lawmaker no longer belongs. Then ask what that signals for everyone else.

Nor is this dynamic confined to protests.

The Democratic Socialists of America has been explicit about working within the Democratic Party by electing candidates, influencing primaries, and reshaping the party from within. The effects are already becoming visible. Israel is increasingly elevated from one foreign policy issue among many into a defining moral touchstone – even in races for municipal office.

Figures such as Zohran Mamdani have articulated the underlying premise directly, arguing that Israel should not exist as a Jewish state because it “privileges one religion over another.”

That argument requires reducing Judaism to merely a religion while ignoring that the Jewish people are an indigenous ethnoreligious nation with shared ancestry, history, language, and culture. It also requires the chutzpah to overlook a broader reality: more than fifty Muslim-majority states privilege Islam to varying degrees in law and/or practice, while numerous countries define themselves by a dominant national or religious identity. Yet only one state is routinely declared inherently illegitimate simply because it exists as the national homeland of a particular people.

Israel also remains the freest country in the Middle East for LGBTQ people and among the region’s strongest protectors of religious liberty.

Those facts rarely enter the discussion. Because consistency is not the point. Conformity is.

There is something distinctly Puritanical about movements that elevate ideological purity above everything else. Once orthodoxy becomes the highest virtue, disagreement is no longer treated as good-faith dissent. It becomes evidence of moral contamination.

There is a reason the Salem witch trials continue to resonate more than three centuries later. They remind us that movements organized around ideological purification rarely stop with their original targets. Once accusation becomes enough, yesterday’s ally quickly becomes today’s heretic.

Scott Wiener learned that lesson at San Francisco Pride. But this story is not really about Scott Wiener.

It is about the direction of a movement that increasingly treats support for the continued existence of the world’s only Jewish state as a disqualifying moral offense – even when that support comes from one of the most progressive LGBTQ elected officials in America.

For mainstream Jewish Democrats, the warning could hardly be clearer.

Many remain deeply committed to the Democratic Party’s historic ideals of civil rights, pluralism, minority protections, religious liberty, and liberal democracy. But if support for Israel increasingly functions as the movement’s version of a Salem accusation – a charge from which no amount of progressive credentials can provide absolution – then many lifelong Jewish Democrats will eventually discover what Scott Wiener discovered.

The political movement they helped build no longer accepts them.

History suggests that movements built around ideological purification rarely become more tolerant over time. They become narrower, more suspicious, and increasingly willing to consume their own.

Scott Wiener was never really the target. But he is a warning.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.