This post on his blog is apparently a talk he gave at the second Berkeley Faculty Club symposium on American Politics and Democracy. He begins by noting he is out of his comfort zone discussing these matters, being an economist and not a political scientist. You should read it anyway because he brings to it the same thoughtful, insightful thinking he brings to economics.
I want to quote some of its passages…
An economist is going to start thinking about democracy with Tony Downs’s economic theory of same. First-past-the-post electoral systems and office-seeking politicians should produce a two-party system. Office-seeking candidates simply won’t join any third party because their chances of election will be too small. Only those who want to make some ideological or demonstrative point rather than to actually win office and then make policy–cough, Ralph Nader, cough–will do so. Hence the stable configuration has two parties. And then the two parties hug the center and follow policies attractive to the median voter.
Ideology will matter–politicians do not run purely for love of office but rather to then make the country into what they regard as a better place. There will be swings to the left, to the right, to the up, to the down, to the forward, to the back. But the policy views of the median voter ought, according to Tony Downs, function as a strong attractor and we should not expect the policies implemented by the politicians who get elected to deviate far from them.
Now there are qualifications. It is the median voter, not the median citizen.George W. Bush became president not because his policies came closer to the preferences of the median person who voted on that Tuesday in November but because his policies came closer to the preferences of the median Supreme Court justices Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor. Gerrymandering and misapportionment–cough, the Senate, cough–matter a lot. But these are qualifications. Tony Downs made a very strong case that first-past-the-post electoral systems will produce policies that the median voter likes. Thus in this sense the electorate gets the government it deserves. If there are problems, the problems are in the minds of the voters rather than in the Democratic system.
That is the economist’s not theory, not analysis, but rather prejudice. theory. Political scientists will scorn it as hopelessly naïve. But it is the benchmark from which I start.
In a democracy…in a healthy functional democracy, the middle will act as a check on the extremes. This isn’t necessarily a good thing, like when the middle position still favors segregation of the races and the second class status of women as it did here in the 1950s. But the point is the voters generally get the government they asked for, or in H.L. Mencken’s lovely phrase, “Democracy is based on the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
But the middle does not like republican policies. I could go on and on about that but it’s basically a fact that the polls show next to no public support for republican economic policies, which are generally understood to benefit only the richest of the rich. Yet those are the policies we get, often with lackluster democratic opposition, if any. So what happened?
Now let me shift and talk about our experience here in America since I got to Washington in early 1993, carrying spears for Alicia Munnell in Lloyd Benson’s Treasury Department in the Clinton administration.
Clinton was a centrist Democrat. The Clinton administration’s priorities were by and large, with exceptions–gays in the military–what you might call “Eisenhower Republican” priorities. Expand healthcare coverage so there were fewer uninsured and fewer people dumped by ambulances on the corners of the Tenderloin. But also control government healthcare cost which were then ballooning out of control–even though we didn’t know what “ballooning out of control” really meant. Balance the budget. End welfare as we know it–thus buying into the Republican critique of the Depression-era belief that raising children was real work–even if you were not married to a rich husband who was the chief executive of Bain Capital–and a socially-valuable task. Passing NAFTA. Creating the World Trade Organization. Strengthening Social Security through a combination of tax increases, benefit cuts, retirement=age increases, mandated private accounts requiring individuals to contribute their own money over and above Social Security (as an add-on but not a carve-out, as a supplement to and not a substitute for Roosevelt’s New Deal’s Social Security).
All of these seemed to us in the early 1990s to be bang-on the median voter’s preferences, Eisenhower Republicans. Clinton Democrats. We in the Bentsen Treasury at the start of 1993 looked forward to doing an awful lot of technocratic work–cranking out centrist legislation approved by large bipartisan majorities.
We found Republicans cooperative on NAFTA.
We found Republicans pushing for welfare reform–but only to the extent of passing things that were so highly punitive that they could not believe any Democratic president could in good conscience sign them. But Clinton fooled them. He signed welfare reform–and then spent some time in 1996 campaigning on the message: “re-elect me because only I can undo some of the damage that I have done to the welfare system”. Which was true. And which he did.
Otherwise…
That was the old game. Hammer out compromise legislation and move on because at the end of the day what was important to both sides was keeping the country strong and prosperous, even if they had different ideas of how to go about that, even if it meant their individual constituencies didn’t get everything they wanted. Everyone agreed at the end of the day that the government still had to function and it’s work needed to get done.
But notice how the center as defined by Bill Clinton was by then way further to the right on economic policy then it was at any time since The New Deal. What was happening was since Watergate the republicans had become more radicalized and the democrats just kept playing the old game of Find The Center. And over a span of just a few elections that had moved the center way to the right. What happened next was the logical outcome of that.
Otherwise the Republicans when I got to Washington at the start of 1993 decided that they were going to adopt the Gingrich strategy: oppose everything the Democratic president proposes, especially if it had previously been a Republican proposal and priority. That is not a strategy that would ever be adopted by anybody who wants to see their name written in the Book of Life.
But Gingrich found followers.
And so things that we in the Bentsen Treasury all expected to happen, did not happen. We had expected that sometime between January and June 1994 Lloyd Bentsen’s chief healthcare aide would sit down with Bob Dole’s chief healthcare aide. We had expected that they would hammer out a deal so that people in the future would never be as dependent on on charity for their healthcare as Bob Dole was when he returned injured from World War II.
That meeting never happened. Bob Dole decided he would rather join Gingrich to try to portray Clinton as a failure. So Bob Dole never got a legislative accomplishment out of his years in Congress. Instead, he got to lose a presidential election. And I now remember Bob Dole not as the co-architect of health care reform in 1994 but as somebody who denounced Roosevelt and Truman for getting us into those Democrat wars that saved Europe from the Nazis, China and the rest of Asia from Imperial Japan, and that have allowed South Koreans to grow five inches taller than their North Korean cousins.
As my friend Mark Schmitt wrote in his review of Geoffrey Kabaservice’s book about the moderate Republicans, Rule and Ruin, the moderate Republicans were partisan Republicans first and Americans second…
Exactly. He goes on to give an account of this just getting worse and worse, first with Clinton and the impeachment circus, then, massively so, with president Obama.
Then came Obama in 2009 and 2010. My friends–Christina Romer, Lawrence Summers, Peter Orszag, and company–headed off to Washington to plan a Recovery Act that they thought would get 25 Republican votes in the Senate. It was a squarely bipartisan fiscal stimulus: this tax cut to make the Republicans stand up and applaud, this infrastructure increase to make the Democrats applaud, this increase in aid to the states to make the governors and state legislators applaud.
It didn’t get 25 Republican votes in the Senate. It got 3.
On healthcare reform, Barrack Obama’s opening bid was the highly-Republican Heritage Foundation plan, the plan that George Romney had chosen for Massachusetts.
RomneyCare got zero republican votes.
On budget balance Obama’s proposals have not been the one-to-one equal amounts of tax increases and spending cuts to balance the budget of Clinton 1993 or Bush 1990. Obama’s proposals have been more along the lines of $1 of tax increases for every $5 of spending cuts.
And the Republicans rejected them
And so on… DeLong starts the time of the breaking of our democracy with Gingrich. That’s likely because he saw it first hand there in Washington. But Gingrich was the next logical outcome down a course the republicans have been relentlessly following since Nixon and the Southern Strategy.
In the years after the civil war and the first and second world wars, we thought of ourselves as one country. Regardless of where people stood on the left/right spectrum there was this general sense that at the end of the day we were all Americans and there was a love of country that moderated all but the lunatic fringe. Nixon understood that this e pluribus unum mindset would leave a party that by then existed simply to represent the interests of big business, the rich and the powerful in a permanent minority status.
Working Americans were fine with The New Deal. As long as the prosperity of the working class was rising the tide for the upper classes too the republican establishment was fine with just tinkering around the edges. But it couldn’t last. Eisenhower was conservative on many social issues, weak on civil rights and civil liberties, but not overtly hostile as the Nixon/McCarty branch of the party was. He was the last of the moderate republicans who believed that a healthy middle class was necessary to the vitality of the economy and the security of the United States.
Nixon hated the elites, the intellectuals, the liberals. He positioned himself as the champion of the common man against the elites. But it was those elites who had improved the status of the common man, and now threatened to do the same for women and minorities. Nixon was no great friend to the rich and powerful either, but as they would decades later in a man called Dubya they saw in Nixon’s paranoia and bottomless hatred someone who might just break the New Deal coalition of labor, rural and urban voters. And then they could go back to what they were doing back in Hoover’s Day…getting rich quick in the Wall Street casino.
Divide the country and we’ll have the bigger half Pat Buchanan told Nixon. But without a doubt Nixon took that advice because he was already considering it. Divisive pit American against American campaigning had been his method of winning elections since his first run for congress. They simply scaled the Nixon technique up and made it a permanent American against American cold war. Very deliberately they sought to replace in the working class voter love of country with love of tribe. No more of this e pluribus unum communist socialist nonsense. And like Gingrich would decades later, they found allies. White blue collar workers who hated black people. Males resentful toward independent women. Rural voters who loathed big city people with their big city morals and ideas. Poor people jealous of union workers with their union paychecks. Christian fundamentalists who loath the people in the church across the street.
When you got right down to it, America was a country of the imagination only. It wasn’t a nation by blood and ancestry. Our shared history is very brief compared to what the peoples of Europe, Asia and South America see as their own. The United States is a nation based on a political ideal of liberty and justice for all. The social contract was simply that we had each others backs when it came to that liberty and justice for all thing. Your freedom in the pursuit of happiness is as dear to me as my own. We are all Americans. As long as that held true a party of the rich and powerful would never win very many elections or wield enough power to impose its will on the majority. But the New Deal majority was a coalition of many diverse parts of working America and the republicans became expert at playing them against each other, that they might rule over all.
When Scott Walker was caught talking about using a divide and conquer strategy he wasn’t just talking about himself or just breaking the unions: this has been the essential republican strategy for gaining and keeping power since Nixon. Divide the country, set working American against working American, and in the end the rich and powerful take all. And it’s worked.
One thing I have learned from watching the Wall Street boys run the country is they’re not very good at it, and at some level they might even know they’re not very good at it. But they don’t care about running the country, they just want to get it out of their way so they can chase some more money. It’s all about the money chase with them. When the economy tanks, when the stock market goes bust, when banks and businesses go bankrupt right and left, they blame everyone but themselves. They’re like a bunch of drunk drivers convinced they’re fit to drive because they haven’t killed anyone yet, and when they do it was an accident and it was dark and that pedestrian just jumped right out in front of them and they didn’t mean to do it so stop treating them like criminals. Once upon a time the nation had laws against their sort of drunk driving. Those laws were there to protect the rest of us. But those law got in their way. Who are you to tell me I can’t drink and drive…it’s my car and my taxes paid for the highway and if I can’t drink and drive then it’s not a free country and all you other drivers on the road are socialists.
The money chase is all they care about. The New Deal coalition got in their way so they set about busting it apart. If in the process of doing that they ripped America apart too and put the nation at risk of catastrophic social upheaval that isn’t important. If once the brakes are off their reckless driving crashes the economy to smithereens and the lives of honest hard working Americans are destroyed and the future strength and security of the nation is placed in jeopardy that isn’t important. They don’t care about America. They are citizens of the stock market.
If my mother’s rule was right I was already thinking pretty well. But she also said, “Cold feet – warm heart” and that’s a different matter. -John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley.
Male libido is assumed to be a constant, quivering thrum. For some men, maybe it is. But for me, as much as I enjoy the old in-n-out, the rubba-dub-dubba, the squeak-n-bubble, I have never craved it the way our culture has led me to believe I should, not even during my fabled Horny Years from ’91 to ’95. Except for those moments when I was in the first throes of a new love, sex has never subsumed me. Yet every cultural message I receive has led me to believe it should. Consequently, my lack of nymphomaniacal tendencies has always left me feeling embarrassed and emasculated.
That’s me. When I was a teenager, and still had not admitted to myself that I’m gay, I was mostly turned off by what I regarded as the oversexed conversations of my friends. On the one hand I was too polite to say anything negative about their preoccupation with girls. On the other, I understood perfectly well that if I didn’t at least make some effort at joining in I would be regarded as a weirdo. I decided to just go with the weirdo thing and make friends with other weirdos. Problem was, they were, or at least seemed to be, just as horny as everyone else with a Y chromosome.
Then I came out to myself as gay. Fine. Okay. This explains why I wasn’t all about tits and ass. Well…at least female ass. But it wasn’t long before I came to realize I still wasn’t all that horny compared to my fellow gay males either. Yes, yes…I liked the look of comely guys. And there were times when the very thought of having sex with some of them would drive me completely nuts. But those were mostly guys I was crushing on. Random pretty bods would turn me on after a fashion, yes, but quite soon after coming out it became clear to me that my sexual thermostat was set several degrees below that of my gay male peers.
And even in the gay community, or perhaps especially in the gay community, if you aren’t 100 percent horny, 100 percent of the time, people think there is something wrong with you. Something, of course, that getting laid will cure.
I remember way back in the BBS days, the Gay bulletin board I frequented, and did volunteer work for, GLIB (for Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau) had a guest columnist on sexual health. Questions posted to the doctor’s forum were anonymous. One day a fellow glibber, male, wrote that he was concerned that his libido was too weak. He needed he said, lots and lots of gentle foreplay just to get a head of steam up for it. The doctor assured him basically what this heterosexual columnist is saying here: human males aren’t all as sexually charged as the stereotype says we are. There’s nothing wrong with you, find a boyfriend who understands your sexual needs, relax and enjoy the extended foreplay. Reading this exchange, I was tremendously relieved. It was, I am not kidding, one of those Wow…I’m not the only one after all moments gay boys are supposed to have when growing up, but for an entirely different reason.
To me, sex isn’t even about sex. Fundamentally, it’s about acceptance, having somebody desire you enough to allow you to envelop them and wanting that person to envelop you in return.
This. What Steinbeck’s mom said, presumably about women, is true of a lot of men too. It’s true of me. You could never get me into the sack at a moment’s notice. But I could be coaxed. Perhaps this was always for the best anyway. A guy who thinks coaxing is superfluous would obviously not be dating material either.
A friend at work who is seriously into the family genealogy thing unearthed, at my request, the above newspaper fragment of my family history. That is a photograph of my dad laying dead on the sidewalk after he’d tried to rob another bank. I just saw this image a few days ago and even thinking that I’d made my peace with all that it had its impact on me somewhere deep down inside. This is the first time I’ve seen this photo. I’d only asked my friend to see if he could dig up a newspaper article about it. I hadn’t expected to actually see dad laying dead on a sidewalk. But…well…I asked for it. Some days I wish I’d had that Leave It To Beaver life I saw on the TV growing up and some days I’m fine with the life I had. But even those days when I’m fine with it I wonder about what might have been, had I had the chances the other kids got. Thing of it is though, it would have been some other kid who had that better life, had mom married the other guy instead of the one who died robbing a bank.
A Certain Someone down in Florida told me recently that I was “a piece of work.” So by way of explanation I’ve been giving him some insight these past few days as to why that might be via email. Getting into the telling of it…how I came to be both the son of a man who died robbing a bank and a good Christian woman…is something I find I just need to get out of me now anyway. So I’m going to tell the whole thing, in several parts over a period of time, omitting or disguising only pieces of it that might enable a more modern sort of crook then dad in his day would ever have imagined, and make some of those still living a bit too uncomfortable.
In retrospect I’ve had…an interesting life. It’s taught me a lot. And in a day and age when single mothers are disrespected by dishonest political frauds and pious pulpit thumping louts I think there may be some value in the telling of it. When you have been raised by a divorced, single working mother back in the 1950s and 60s, you got a front row seat into how 50s sexual morality and the status of woman worked in practice as opposed to theory. You also come to know something intimately well: that if a kid has just one good parent who loves them and sets a good example, they’ve got all they need for life.
Probably the biggest shocker to some of you, a thing I’ve only recently been able to talk openly about with just a few select friends, is the situation with my dad. My story has always been he was a truck driver, and that he was. But toward the end of his life he lost the truck and he turned to robbing banks. And that is how he came to his end. Thievery wasn’t so much a way of life with him as a bad habit he would fall in and out of. Mom loved him very much but when I was two she divorced him when his gambling and thievery became too much. It broke her heart. When they started seeing each other again I was 15 and he was making an honest living as an interstate truck driver. One summer he took me out on the road with him. It is a treasured memory. But the truck was taken away from him and he apparently decided afterward to get his money where the money was. I learned about that the afternoon I heard a knock at the door and opened it to find two very nice FBI agents there who wanted to know if I knew where dad was.
So Dad…had issues. I’ll try my best in the telling of my story to be fair to him as well as honest. I bear him no grudge whatsoever. He was my dad. It’s possible for a boy to love his dad even knowing that dad is probably not the person you want to grow up to be.
Mom was a good Baptist woman in the old sense, not the modern right wing political sense. She set a good example and raised me as well as she could on the income of a single working woman in the 1950s and 60s. We didn’t have much, but I never really noticed when I was young because we lived in neighborhoods were nobody else really did either. Mom worked for most of her life as a clerk in a company that sold advertising. Her mother, Ruth took care of me while mom was at work. Ruth hated dad from what I hear the moment she laid eyes on him, and she often took that out on me when mom wasn’t looking. If you notice I never refer to her as grandma during this little history, that’s why.
Mom met dad one day on the pier at Avalon on Catalina Island. But this story needs to start before that. When she was a young woman she met and fell in love with a Jewish man, Morris, who was in the Navy, serving on a ship in the Pacific during World War II…
I do political cartoons for my local gay paper, Baltimore OUTLoud. Being published regularly allowed me to gain membership in The Associate Of American Editorial Cartoonists…a dream come true. Cartooning was the first love and political cartooning, what was called the Ungentlemanly Art, is a form of expression that I’ve been attracted to since I was a teenager, growing up in the Washington D.C. suburbs with Herblock and Gib Crockett in my daily newspapers. In high school my cartoons were in the student newspaper and on the walls of a few select social studies classrooms.
Jacob Bronowski once said that great art doesn’t set out to preach, but to shine a light in which the outlines of good and evil are “are seen in fearful sharpness of outline.” The best political cartoons are like that. It’s very easy, and most fall into that rut of being preachy. But the best ones shine that light.
I try to do that with my cartoons. When I see myself getting too preachy on the drawing board I start over. But I get angry too and sometimes I just let the anger out and my viewers can take it or leave it. Like this one I did after California Proposition 8 passed…
That’s all done on the paper by the way, only the lettering is done in the computer. I still draw my cartoons with “traditional media” and scan it in, not so much because I am a throwback as I just work intuitively with those tools better then with a digitizer pad.
That angry metaphor of the severed ring finger works for me artistically, and at some deep level it gets out of me something that just needs getting out. I hate saying this about myself because it sounds so pretentious but I am an artist. The way I know that about myself isn’t that I like to draw or that I like it very much when my drawings get looked at, it’s if you put me on a desert island with no tools to make imagery with I would cut me some sticks and twigs and draw in the sand because I just have to get it out of me from time to time whether it makes any sense to anyone or not and even if nobody else ever sees it but me. I have to do this from time to time or I will go nuts. It’s just something I am. And maybe I’m not really that good at it either. Lots of times I will look at my stuff and think I really stink at it. But I know I can’t stop doing it. Drawing…painting…photography….it’s all about the image. It’s a language I need to communicate in…much of the time just to think my world and my life through.
For my political cartoons, unlike a lot of cartoonists, I don’t do many rough sketches first. I do the drawing first in my head, and when I can see it clearly in there, then I sit down at the drafting table. Yesterday I had one ready to go, concerning the vote against same-sex marriage in North Carolina. I’d been drawing it in my mind the moment I laid eyes on the advertisement Billy Graham placed in a bunch of North Carolina newspapers. Where there any chance of that amendment not passing, Graham effectively killed it with those ads and I was angry. And immediately when I saw the ad the image for a cartoon about the likely outcome of the vote came immediately to my mind. I thought about it for days and it changed very little in my visualization of it. I was angry. The image was angry.
Yesterday morning I read the news and even though I had been completely expecting the outcome, it hit me hard. Every fucking time one of these votes happens it feels like a kick in the stomach. And you know that’s exactly the purpose of having these votes…to make gay people hurt. Because if we don’t bleed they aren’t righteous. And I did hurt. I walked around all morning long carrying this lump of grief like a stone in my gut. Reading the streams on Facebook and Twitter I could see others did too. But I did notice something that lifted my spirits even so. This time…This Time…that stone in the gut was being carried by a lot of heterosexuals too. This was what I knew would eventually win this thing: when enough of our heterosexual neighbors began to see this struggle as theirs too…feel it in their gut the same way we feel it in ours. Even as I grieved I could see we were winning this thing. But it felt so painful…so very very painful. But I had my outlet. I was going to go home from work that day, and right to my drafting table, and out would come the cartoon I had visualized so clearly in my mind’s eye for days.
Then…this…
…and all of a sudden Billy Graham didn’t matter anymore. And something happened to me that made me realize how much anger I have been carrying with me all these years. I stopped being angry. It almost literally felt like a weight had been taken off me.
I don’t know if I’ll do that cartoon now. I might…it’s still something I think needs being said about him, about the people who put so much hard work into kicking their gay neighbors in the face. You can shine Bronowski’s fearful sharp light at evil, but you can also shine it at the good, and I am not so very angry anymore. Life is good. Hard sometimes, but good.
Time was the haters could make us hate ourselves as much as they hated us. Then that time was over, and they could no longer make us hate ourselves and that made them angry. It made them angry and so they had to make us angry too. And being angry all the time can be a stone around your neck too. Not as big a one as hating yourself, but big enough all the same to keep you from having a decent life. Perhaps anger, unlike self hate, is a necessary thing. Perhaps without that righteous anger we would not have worked so hard, and come so far, so fast. But the day is coming when we don’t have to be angry anymore.
I can appreciate that some people have deeply held religious beliefs. What I don’t appreciate is some people turning my hopes and dreams of love into their stepping stones to heaven. I can appreciate that some people have had a hard life. But only a runt uses that as an excuse to inflict pain on others. I can appreciate how it is to feel your peace and security threatened by forces you don’t understand. That has never once made me want to become that force against others. I have always wished you peace. You will need to let me have mine too though, because that’s just the way peace works.
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina voters approved a constitutional amendment on Tuesday defining marriage solely as a union between a man and a woman, making it the 30th state to adopt such a ban.
Thirty states. Thirty states. Oh…and it’s more then simply a ban on same-sex marriage. That amendment was an all out attack on same-sex couples having any legal rights that heterosexuals are bound to respect.
I have reflected often on the fact that the only reason I feel free to explore my country, take the long cross-country drives I love, is that I am single. The saving grace of it is that the side of my family that approves of constitutionally kicking their gay neighbors in the teeth all live in states I couldn’t visit anyway were I happily coupled. Should that day ever come, it will save me a lot of excuse making. Tell you what…you come visit us. We’d love to have you over! And your marriages are valid here so don’t worry.
Hollande now has a delicate few weeks. French legislative elections are scheduled in June, and Hollande must steer between twin dangers. On the one hand, if it turns out that all his talk about reform and growth was just so much election verbiage and once he’s in office he plans to continue French policy more or less as before, then disillusioned voters could turn on him next month. On the other hand, if he pushes against Germany and the financial markets too forcefully, a crisis of confidence in France and in Europe could develop in the markets.
Note the turn of phrase we’ve been hearing a lot lately. A Crisis In Confidence…
I’m a little fuzzy… They talking about loosing confidence in the ability of working people to deliver goods and services, or are they talking about loosing confidence in the ability of financiers to keep squeezing working people dry?
Yeah, yeah…rhetorical question. I’m just full of them.
Please Turn The Other Cheek Again…And Again…And Again…And Again…And Again…And Again…And Again…And Again…And Again…Or Else Reconciliation Will Be Very Difficult…
I am saddened that Richard Grennell, Mitt Romney’s foreign policy spokesman, resigned over what the press is saying was pressure from the far right because he is openly gay. Who cares? He had a distinguished career as a spokesman for four United Nations Ambassadors and was widely respected. It is particularly disconcerting to learn that religious groups criticized Romney for appointing him due to his homosexuality.
As an Orthodox rabbi with a gay Orthodox Jewish brother, I have endeavored mightily to reconcile the dictates of my faith with the most human, loving and respectful approach to homosexuality. I have counseled hundreds of gay men and women of faith who seek to find their place in G-d’s love amid a gay lifestyle.
But such efforts at reconciliation are undone by the gratuitous hate-filled bigotry of people like Dan Savage…
Okay…stop right there. Never mind what you’re calling Savage’s bigotry others would say was simply a case of looking into a cesspool and calling the stink out for what it is. Never mind that what you’re calling his hate anyone without an ax to grind would agree is more a case of eminently justifiable anger toward a class of people who simply cannot seem to rest so long as gay people have any rights at all, let alone the right to marry. Never mind all of that. Reconciliation is unlikely to occur so long as people posturing as bridge builders insist on this kind of transparently self-serving false equivalency. Comparing Savage’s behavior, however insulting it may have seemed to anyone in his audience the day those Christianist kids walked out, to what their gay peers have to endure on a daily basis, usually from the likes of the same kids who walked out, is sickening.
Or as Christian author John Shore, said, “Theirs was not an act born of suffering. It was a proud show of disdain.”
Reconciliation. In just a few days righteous upstanding North Carolina citizens will be voting on whether or not to cut their homosexual neighbor’s ring fingers off. And from the pulpit right on cue comes this sort of thing:
“So your little son starts to act a little girlish when he is four years old and instead of squashing that like a cockroach and saying, “Man up, son, get that dress off you and get outside and dig a ditch, because that is what boys do,” you get out the camera and you start taking pictures of Johnny acting like a female and then you upload it to YouTube and everybody laughs about it and the next thing you know, this dude, this kid is acting out childhood fantasies that should have been squashed.
Can I make it any clearer? Dads, the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give him a good punch. Ok?
So I suppose if I call that man a gutter crawling maggot for telling parents they have a duty to break their gay kid’s wrists and punch them out I’m making reconciliation very difficult. You may want to keep in mind the words of Malcolm X: If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound… Proudly walking out of a talk because the speaker challenged your right to throw the Leviticus death threat into the faces of your gay classmates isn’t even pulling the knife out a little. Let alone thumping your pulpit that others might punch bruises into gay kids hearts that they will carry for life.
[Slightly different from what I posted in response at Huffington Post, because my words have a little more room to breath here then there]
According to poll workers and a freelance journalist who was present, the wife of the author of North Carolina’s Amendment One says that her husband wrote the bill to “protect Caucasians.”
Chad Nance, a Winston-Salem freelance journalist who is currently active in electoral campaigning, says poll workers outside the early voting site at the Forsyth County Government Center in downtown Winston-Salem reported to him that the wife of NC Sen. Peter Brunstetter remarked today that her husband sponsored legislation to put the marriage amendment on the primary ballot “to protect the Caucasian race.”
When I read that headline I assumed it would be some crackpot bullshit about the birth rate. But no. The article goes on to quote her saying that…somehow…protecting the Caucasians from same-sex marriage involves protecting their state constitution from activist judges.
If you’re not sure how opposing same-sex marriage protects Caucasians don’t worry…it doesn’t have to make sense to you. To the bigot everything is about the war against the hated other, whether it’s gays, people of color, other religions, people who speak funny languages…whomever. They have a lot of racism down there and I’m sure somehow this makes sense to all of them. Opposing same-sex marriage is about protecting the white race. Probably opposing daylight savings time is too.
Sean Harris, pastor of Berean Baptist Church on Glensford Drive, said he does not advocate hitting children and wishes he could take back a remark encouraging fathers to punch boys who act effeminately…
…and let’s just forget completely about that part about cracking their wrists…
…But he defended his belief in the need to reinforce traditional gender roles in children. “If I had to say it again, I would say it differently, no doubt,” Harris said Tuesday. “Those weren’t planned words, but what I do stand by is that the word of God makes it clear that effeminate behavior is ungodly.”
Preaching at parents that they need to break the bones of their gay kids however being the epitome of godliness. So long as you say it differently. As the twig is bent so grows the tree…so parents I give you special dispensation to crack those dear little twigs back into Straightnesswhen you see them going limp…
Coming Soon To A fundamentalist Church Near You! Pat downs for recording devices, and petitions to make taping anti-gay child abusive rants in church a class one felony punishable by stoning…
TRANSCRIPT: “So your little son starts to act a little girlish when he is four years old and instead of squashing that like a cockroach and saying, “Man up, son, get that dress off you and get outside and dig a ditch, because that is what boys do,” you get out the camera and you start taking pictures of Johnny acting like a female and then you upload it to YouTube and everybody laughs about it and the next thing you know, this dude, this kid is acting out childhood fantasies that should have been squashed.
Can I make it any clearer? Dads, the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give him a good punch. Ok? You are not going to act like that. You were made by God to be a male and you are going to be a male. And when your daughter starts acting to Butch you reign her in. And you say, “Oh, no, sweetheart. You can play sports. Play them to the glory of God. But sometimes you are going to act like a girl and walk like a girl and talk like a girl and smell like a girl and that means you are going to be beautiful. You are going to be attractive. You are going to dress yourself up.”
You say, “Can I take charge like that as a parent?”
Yeah, you can. You are authorized. I just gave you a special dispensation this morning to do that.”
[Emphasis mine…] So here is a man behind the pulpit, pastor (sic) Sean Harris Senior Pastor of the Berean Baptist Church in Fayetteville, North Carolina, telling fathers to break the bones and beat up their gay sons, and “reign in” (like the way this guy suggested perhaps?) their gay daughters as a way of making them heterosexual. Loving the sinner. It doesn’t get more authoritative then that. The way you deal with homosexuals is you beat the crap out of them, especially if they’re your own flesh and blood. The guy behind the pulpit says so and he speaks for God.
This is how gay people get killed. This is why gay kids kill themselves, why so many end up homeless and on the streets. Harris, that wasn’t a born again experience you had way back when, it was your soul withering away to nothing shortly after you took your conscience around behind the barn and shot it.
Maggie…here’s what your war on loving same-sex couples has once again wrought. Picture a gay kid in that church, sitting in those pews, hearing this. Picture the fear it puts into them. Yes…I know…you’re fine with that.
Jim Burroway over at Box Turtle Bulletin quotes a little Michael Heath…
During my lifetime I have witnessed the descent from Playboy into the abyss of online porn…
Okay…That’s about all I need to read. If you think the human, let alone the American fascination with pornography started with Playboy Michael, and the mass consumption therein, then you have been very grievously misinformed. Google Tijuana Bible Mike. No…that’s not a translation for Spanish speaking Christians.
My own fascination with pornography ended pretty soon after it began, when I eventually figured out (don’t laugh) that there is very little romance in it. The few porn magazines I bought back in the day all had images of guys being affectionate as well as sexual. That was my turn on. No matter how hot I thought the guys were, if it was just sex I got bored if not a tad turned off. There had to be affection on display too. The more affection the better. But affection of that sort between males was a pretty radical thing to portray in any form back then, back room magazine rack or mainstream movie house. In some ways, and in some venues, it still is.
I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating because it really says it all. Back in the day an old high school friend of mine told me about taking a college course on human sexuality. The course, he said, included a number of films which you might expect to find in an Adult Entertainment store rather then in a university classroom. And so naturally most of the college students who signed up for that course did so, according to my friend who probably did also, just to see those films. What they didn’t bargain for was also having to watch a bunch of sex they didn’t much like. This was after all, a course on human sexuality, not a course on pornography. In addition to the hot young babes there was also footage of folks old enough to be their own parents having sex. Then there were the sections on geriatric sex. You can imagine how well that went over with a bunch of college students. But it was the section on gay male sex that bothered some the audience most of all. And it wasn’t the sex specifically that offended them. In fact, the sex really didn’t bother that group much at all. According to my friend, when the gay male sex scenes came on screen the ignorant jock types in the class burst out laughing and mocked the couple.
But then images of that couple being affectionate with each other came on screen and the jock’s attitude changed. Those scenes of that male couple being affectionate, kissing, holding hands, being in love, completely offended the jocks my friend said, far more, far, Far more, then watching them have sex did.
What pornography is, to my mind at least, is it just pushes your sexual buttons and nothing else. That’s all it’s for. That’s all it does. Empty button pushing. But that’s all some folks want it to be. Oh well for them I guess. What I discovered about myself, and had I not the freedom to at least look the stuff over I might not have figured this out about myself, is that I am about romance, affection, playful fun, when it comes to sex. I like to be teased. I like the friendly smile and the longing look. And the kiss. Especially the kiss. I am not much about just having my buttons pushed for the sake of pushing them. There has to be more. There has to be love. There has to be the kiss. So what my little private collection of erotic art began to consist mostly of as I grew older, is that. Sex yes, but not always that specifically and always in the context of romance. Body and soul together. I love that. It turns me on.
Your mileage may vary. That’s fine. I’m pretty sure in any case that your definition of pornography Michael is almost certainly a lot broader then mine. Anything having to do with same-sex couples even if it’s just a kiss probably counts as pornography in your book. No…Especially if it’s just a kiss. Because homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. But here’s the thing Michael…most of us just look the other way when we’re grossed out or disinterested. When I found out there wasn’t much in pornography that interested me, at least of the hard core sort, I stopped looking. But you can’t for some reason.
Don’t you think that puts you in the same ugly peep show stall that the people you’re railing against are stuck in? Well…except they seem to be enjoying themselves and you’re not. And what is offending you most of all Michael, isn’t the sex gay couples are having. It’s the affection. It’s their joy. It’s the kiss…isn’t it Michael. You’re calling it “sodomy based marriage” now…it’s your new slogan that you seem to honestly think is a winner but it’s merely your way of turning kisses into pornography. Because that’s how they seem to you.
You begin your email to supporters with a little rant about pornography, but it’s all about same-sex marriage with you, not pornography, not sexual decadence. And that’s because it’s the kiss that offends you, not the sodomy. Marriage is about love and devotion, about body and soul together as one, and same sex couples are fighting for access to marriage, because they love, because they are devoted, because they are one in body and soul. And you see it don’t you. Yes…yes you do. And it bothers you massively doesn’t it. And you can’t look away. Why is that Michael?
Some might suggest that it’s because you’re a closet case yourself. I honestly doubt that you are in that particular sort of closet. There’s another, darker, colder one your sort lives their lives in. There is a marvelous scene in Mary Renault’s The Fire From Heaven, where Alexander’s father Philip, punishing his son and his son’s lover for a transgression, knowing that the punishment of his lover will hurt Alexander more then his own punishment, thinks, “…between contempt and a deep secret envy…The man does not live that I could feel that for, or the woman either.”There you are Michael. There’s why you can’t look away. There’s why you need their kisses to be empty. There’s why you hate them.
[Update…] After I cross posted this over to Truth Wins Out I checked out some of the other posts there and found This One from Evan Hurst concerning Peter LaBarbra’s post also referencing the rant of Coach Dave Daubenmire that I riffed on a few posts back. Remarkably, it contained this image from an episode of Glee, tastefully censored to prevent cases of the vapors in the kook pews. I’ve captured the full context from Pete’s site….just look at this would you…
…blocked for decency’s sake… Oh make my case for me why don’t you? Christ almighty…Pete…listen…there is something seriously wrong with you. If the image of two guys in love kissing is enough to motivate you to start up the image editor of your choice, load that image into it, and take the time to carefully black out (white out?) those two dear little pairs of lips locked like they were mashing genitals instead of kissing, you have problems. Seriously…get help.
If you didn’t catch “Meet the Press” yesterday, you missed a lively conversation about, among other things, women’s votes in 2012 and the policy controversies that have put women’s issues at the forefront of the political landscape.
As you’ll see in this clip, around the 5:20 mark, Rachel noted the pay disparity between men and women in this country, which prompted some unexpected pushback (and incessant interruptions) from Republican strategist Alex Castellanos.
Unexpected? Like the incessant interruptions? Golly it’s almost as if they wanted to just shut you up woman…
The angle to this to keep in mind is that the Republicans on the panel, Castellanos and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), simply reject the available facts on the wage gap. Despite ampleevidence that shows women make less than men for the same work, Castellanos chooses to believe his own version of reality in which that’s not the case.
…
There’s simply no shared foundation of reality, which in turn shapes the policy debate in unproductive ways. The left sees gender-based pay disparity and looks for mechanisms to address the problem; the right rejects the existence of the disparity and sees no use for the solutions because, to them, there is no problem.
If I may…no. Just…no. You’re giving the right way too much credit for making a good faith argument here.
The problem isn’t that they don’t think gender pay disparity exists. They know damn well it exists. They don’t think that’s a problem. It is instead but a simple The Way God And Nature Intended Things To Be truth. Women just don’t belong in the workplace, let alone the family planning clinic. Giving them equal pay diminishes the rightful status of men and encourages women to abandon their role as child bearers and housekeepers. That said, the right also knows that in this day and age, at least here in the decadent west if not in many areas of the righteous middle east, people are generally sickened by caveman attitudes toward women. This is part of what they see as the decline of civilization. It’s getting so men can’t drag their women around by the hair anymore! So rather then give people their honest reasons why discrimination against women is a good thing they’re spreading a line of propaganda to the effect that there is no discrimination.
Wage discrimination? No such thing! So nothing to see here people….move along…move along…
Dan Savage offended some Christian teens when he told them “We can learn to ignore the bull—t in the Bible about gay people.”
…
After many students walked out of the speech, one of whom appeared to be crying, Savage said, “It’s funny, as someone who’s on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the bible, how pansy-assed some people react when you push back.”
Right on cue the usual suspects wing up the noise machine…
Fox News reports that Savage’s comments upset the executive director of GOProud, a gay conservative group.
“Dan Savage should apologize for his comments and should apologize to the high school students in attendance whom he called ‘pansy-asses,’” Jimmy LaSalvia told Fox. “It is ironic that someone whose claim to fame is fighting bullying would resort to bullying tactics in attacking high school students who were offended by his outrageous remarks.”
There is so much to unpack here. Firstly, the headline. This is that right wing propaganda everyone has bought into over the years, that the only authentic Christians are the right wing bigots and everyone else is just faking it. How many of the kids who stayed to hear what Savage had to say, regardless of what they thought of it, also identified as Christian? We don’t get that information in any of the mainstream news stories I’ve seen on this. No, no…it was Christians, capital ‘C’ who walked out and who Savage tossed a going away insult at. Those were the only Christians in that auditorium that day.
Secondly, Savage didn’t stir up anything…that bubbling open sewer that calls itself the moral majority needs no stirring, it is always on the boil. This incident wouldn’t look more like the usual case of right wing manufactured outrage if those kids were wearing t-shirts that said “We Are Here To Take Offense At Anything You Have To Say”. I am expected to believe that none of the kids in that group who walked out knew who Dan Savage was or what his positions were on sex, gay sex, and the bible am I? Right. Pull the other one.
Suddenly it’s We’re Not The Bullies, Dan Savage Is The Bully, Because He Insulted Us!!! Yes. Yes he did. And a well earned insult it was too. In the Twitter fury that followed, LOLGOP Tweeted: “I’ve not yet met one conservative Christian who is considering suicide because of bullying as thousands of LGBT youth do every day.” Just so. It is grotesque to watch the right wing noise machine compare Dan Savage’s crack about the kids walking out of his talk to what gay kids deal with every day of their lives, usually at the hands of kids like the ones who walked out. This from The Christian Post:
The 17-year-old California student, whose name was not given, told CitizenLink’s Karla Dial that Savage said people using the Bible to justify their views on homosexuality being a sin often cite Leviticus and Romans in saying that “being gay is wrong.”
“Right after that, he said we can ignore all the ‘B.S.’ in the Bible,” the student told CitizenLink, which is affiliated with faith-based organization Focus on the Family.
The student said she suddenly reacted by blurting out “That’s bull!” before storming out of the auditorium along with several other students. Savage reportedly called the students pansies upon noticing their exit.
That passage in Leviticus Savage was telling them was BS, and which the student there is righteously affirming, calls for homosexuals to be put to death, adding “Their blood is upon them”. Yes, we can throw death threats at our classmates and we’re just quoting the bible, but if you call us pansies you’re a bully.
Look at what this tells you about the mindset here. It was a rash of gay kids killing themselves at the beginning of the previous school year that prompted Savage to start his “It Get’s Better” campaign, which has never gotten anything but raspberries from the wingers. Yet now they rise in a righteous howl of anger at a small group of fundamentalist kids being called pansies. Look at it. No…really look at it. These are people who just can’t figure out why tormenting gay kids to death would be such a big deal with anyone other then it’s some kind of political posturing. The way they see it we’re posturing so they get to posture too. That gay kids are being made so miserable by the torrent of hatred being directed at them that they want to kill themselves just doesn’t seem like it should be such a big deal to the wingers.
And the reason for that is simple, obvious, and sickening. The way the right wing sees it, if the kid is gay then being treated like human garbage is what they should expect. Because they are.
Think I’m engaging in hyperbole there? When did you ever see the kind of outrage on the right toward the tormenting of gay kids that you are seeing now being directed at Dan Savage after he called the fundamentalists who walked out of his talk “pansies”. When have you ever heard a winger get upset at gay kids being called that? Cut me a break. They call gay people that and worse all the fucking time and they don’t particularly care if gay kids get called names or not. Who is fighting tooth and nail to prevent anti-bullying campaigns from specifically protecting gay kids from being bullied? The same people who are bellyaching about what Dan Savage said to a group of fundamentalists, that’s who.
How often do I have to see this before I’m allowed to call it what it is? The way the right wing sees it, the way fundamentalist bigots see it, it is only natural to treat gay kids like human garbage. Because they are. God hates them. My bible tells me so and if yours doesn’t you are not a Christian. Make no mistake, the outrage here isn’t entirely manufactured, but if you think it’s out of sympathy for the kids Savage insulted you are still not getting it. The problem isn’t that Dan Savage insulted a group of fundamentalist kids. It’s that he told them to leave their gay peers alone, using language they routinely use against their gay peers. He stood up for the gay kids. There’s where the anger is coming from.
Brutalizing gay people is one of their most cherished religious sacraments. You mess with that and you will hear the gutter scream like they are being crucified.
[Update…] “Theirs was not an act born of suffering. It was a proud show of disdain.” – Christian author John Shore.
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