ScienceDaily (Nov. 18, 2008) — Amendments that restrict civil marriage rights of same-sex couples – such as Proposition 8 that recently passed in California – have led to higher levels of stress and anxiety among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender adults, as well as among their families of origin, according to several new studies to be published by the American Psychological Association.
…
Participants reported feeling not just alienated from their communities, but fearful that they would lose their children, that they would become victims of anti-gay violence or that they would need to move to a more accepting community. Some of these anxieties were mitigated by social support.
For instance, one interviewee said he became "petrified …of being raped or roughed up or killed, you know, for doing nothing, basically. I worry about being picked out as a gay guy because my mannerisms are not entirely masculine." Another said the marriage amendment supporters were using the Bible "like a brick on us. They are beating us with it."
Social support from religious institutions, families, GLBT friends and heterosexual allies led most of the participants "to greater feelings of safety, happiness and strength," the researchers wrote.
And in the third study, 10 family members of GLBT people living in Memphis were interviewed regarding how anti-GLBT initiatives and movements had affected their family. Their responses were also grouped into clusters of similar themes.
"Some participants identified so deeply with their family member’s experience that they felt equally attacked by these movements and policies," the researchers wrote. "They considered themselves members of the GLBT community and experienced rejection by others for being a GLBT family member."
"Typically, we tend to think of anti-GLBT policies such as marriage bans and Proposition 8 as affecting only GLBT people. However, our research suggests that others in addition to GLBT people are also impacted by this legislation and sometimes quite negatively. For example, we learned that some family members experienced a form of secondary minority stress. Although many participants displayed resiliency and effective coping with this stress, some experienced strong negative consequences to their mental and physical health," said Jennifer Arm, M.S.
Emphasis mine. Hold that thought for a moment…
But of course…this is what was supposed to happen. When louts like Lee Benson call us "sore losers" don’t be fooled. They know exactly how we feel about having the knife in our hearts. We’re supposed to feel that way. And they take a good deal of self righteous satisfaction in seeing the impact hit. We are supposed to be sore losers. What we’re not supposed to do is fight back.
What anti same sex marriage amendments are supposed to accomplish, particularly in states where same-sex marriages, and same sex couples, have no legal status to begin with, is further alienating gay people from their communities and their families. That is the point. Not that we aren’t supposed to marry, but that we are not supposed to exist. God doesn’t want us here on this good earth. The faithful are only doing their part to insure that we understand this.
At some point, it all boils over. The wave of anger and revulsion after H8 passed was just a taste of what is to come if the religious right keeps hammering away at same sex couples. Rex Wockner was getting a tad jittery a few weeks ago at all the rage being vented by gay people against their tormentors. But it wasn’t just gay people who were out on the streets. I suppose he was worried that the haters would start killing us in retaliation or something. It’s easy to forget, because the deaths happen one lonely life at a time, that gay people are being killed all the time. The struggle turned violent a long time ago. Before Stonewall even. And that’s not counting the suicides. Humans kill themselves for a variety of reasons, most of which are personal and private. But when a people are constantly and relentlessly driven to it, you have to ask yourself if that isn’t a kind of murder too. There is already a lot of gay blood on the pavement. What happens next, is that straight blood starts splashing down on it too.
Take another look at this article. The stress is noticeably affecting the families and friends of gay people now too. What happened after election night this year, was that hundreds of thousands of our heterosexual family members and friends stood with us on the streets, angry and outraged at what they can see now, finally, at long last, is happening to their gay family and friends. What you have to understand is that isn’t going to make the haters back off. It’s going to scare them. And like the guy in Easy Rider said, it won’t make them running scared, it’ll make them dangerous.
Over at Pam’s House Blend, Pam is reporting that some of the righteous folks behind Proposition H8 are planning to take out a full page New York Times ad, to accuse gay people of a campaign of violence…
According to our source, the ad will cite an incident where a white powder was sent to a church, and "document" disruptions of services at houses of worship. The Becket Fund is also allegedly contacting like-minded anti-gay organizations to request that they sign on to the ad.
Matthew Shepard. Nicholas West. Scotty Joe Weaver. Barry Winchell. Thanh Nguyen. Michael Burzinski, Gary Matson and Winfel Mowder and Billy Jack Gaither and Brandon Teena and William Metz and Carl Warren Jr. and Aaron Webster and all the others listed Here …and all the tens of thousands of tens of thousands more whose names we know and whose names we don’t. A campaign of violence has been going on and on and on for generations against gay people. It is considered so unremarkable by the bigots, and by most of the country still, that when gay people start fighting back they can accuse Us of creating a climate of violence without even smirking. They’ve been looking the other way at violence toward gay people for so long, they really think we’re the ones starting it.
What’s coming next, is that the families and friends of gay people will start dying too, because the bottomless hatred that moves the bigot is unable to distinguish between queers and queer lovers, anymore then it was able to distinguish between niggers and nigger lovers back in the 1950s. The crime that finally shocked the nation during the struggle against race segregation in America, was the killing of three young civil rights workers in Missisisippi, two of whom were white. I prophesy now, that somewhere, right this moment, their hearts beating, young and full of life, are one or more heterosexuals who have an appointment with a bloody and grusome death in the jaws of the same mindless sub-human beast that has been killing gay people for generations. They will die for the crime of loving their neighbor as themselves. And when love is put to death for loving, what is left within the human heart to take its place? It isn’t the rage of gay people Wockner needs to be afraid of.
What California And Florida Could Not Bring Themselves To Do For Love, And Hope, And Dreams Come True…By God, The Mouse Could…And Did…
When I was in Disney World recently, I made a point to ride the monorails. I’d been absolutely fascinated by those things ever since I saw the pictures of the first ones in Disneyland back in the early 70s. I’ve wondered ever since why more cities didn’t have something like them.
On the trip from Magic Kingdom back to the Transportation center, which is a transfer point from the Magic Kingdom and Resort lines to the Epcot line, you go past several Disney resort areas, and the voice in the cars narrating the journey takes note of a little wedding pavilion along the way, just between the Grand Floridian and the Polynesian resorts…
With all the grandeur of a classic Victorian summer home, Disney’s Wedding Pavilion offers many enchanting possibilities for the wedding ceremony of your dreams. With its palm-fringed solarium and views of Cinderella Castle across the Seven Seas Lagoon, this magnificent non-denominational chapel can accommodate your Escape Wedding ceremony with style and grace.
I was coming by then to really like Disney World, and the It’s A Small World After All mentality that pervades it. But I had to wonder if that wedding pavilion was open to all couples, or whether Disney would, to avoid controversy, stipulate that the marriages had to be legally binding in the state of Florida, which had just then passed an anti same-sex marriage amendment.
Well…know I know…
Gay couples given keys to the Magic Kingdom as Disney relents
The Guardian, Saturday April 7 2007
Disney’s theme parks are synonymous with the great American family day out, with the company’s traditional hospitality and characters having enthralled generations for more than half a century.
Now Mickey Mouse has taken a step away from protocol by throwing open the gates of Cinderella’s castle for same-sex partnership ceremonies. Gay and lesbian couples can, for the first time, stage their own commitment ceremonies anywhere on Disney property, a privilege heterosexual couples have enjoyed for decades.
"We are not in the business of making judgments about the lifestyle of our guests," said Donn Walker, spokesman for Disney Parks and Resorts. "We are in the hospitality business, and our parks and resorts are open to everyone."
The shift in position came after complaints that gay couples were specifically excluded from the Fairy Tale Weddings programme at Disney’s theme parks in California and Florida, and on its cruise liners. While others had a wide choice of marriage options, such as taking their vows on a white-knuckle ride or beneath a fireworks show with Minnie Mouse as a bridesmaid, gay couples had to organise their own private ceremonies in rented meeting rooms at resort hotels.
The Walt Disney Company has long been a tacit supporter of gay tourism. It has come under fire from the religious right for policies that include partner benefits for homosexual employees. In the 90s, rightwing groups held protests against the annual "Gay Days", when more than 100,000 gay and lesbian visitors go to Disney resorts.
The company blamed its weddings policy on laws in Florida and California prohibiting same-sex unions. But after pressure from the gay website afterelton.com, it dropped its requirement that Fairy Tale Weddings packages, which start at $8,000 (£4,100), have to include a valid marriage licence. "This is consistent with our policy of creating a welcoming, respectful and inclusive environment for all of our guests," Mr Walker said.
Michael Jensen, the editor of the website, had complained that Disney appeared to be hiding behind the law. Although same-sex wedding ceremonies were not legally recognized, he said, there was nothing to prevent gay couples holding their own ceremonies.
"Elton John, who had a civil union with his partner David Furnish last year in England, would have been turned away from Disney’s wedding gates," Mr Jensen said, pointing out that the singer had earned the company millions of dollars with his music for The Lion King.
Note that happened back in 2007. Nice. And I’ll say this…you can’t stay in the Disney theme parks for long without realizing there is a ton of gay talent there, working hard to make sure everyone enjoys their stay. From the "cast members" in character costume (including several really cute Peter Pan’s I saw during my stay) to the ones who were simply working support roles and keeping the whole complex running smoothly, my Gaydar, which has trouble going off around DuPont Circle, was going off like mad. And even though Gay Days for this year were long over, I still saw the occasional same sex couple strolling through the crowds, hand in hand, or arm in arm. Nobody bothered them.
The pleasant, Let’s All Get Along And Enjoy The Day attitude was infectious and disarming. You felt it everywhere. In Magic Kingdom I took a bad spill one night near main street, while hurrying to the monorail. I’d mis-stepped over a curb and tumbled hard onto a cobblestone pavement with my cameras dangling around me. Luckily neither they nor I were badly hurt, but instantly a crowd of about a dozen or so folks were all around me asking me if I was okay, and helping me back up. In another park I am certain they’d have just walked right on by.
We are in the hospitality business… That, really, sums it up. And it’s the right answer to give to bigoted louts who just can’t enjoy themselves unless other people are suffering. But there is more to it. It’s that It’s A Small World After All mentality. That really does seem to be the bedrock there. I wrote previously how refreshing, how exhilarating it was to see the story of life on earth, and the history of human progress told, not only matter of factly, but that the study of science and history and archeology was a grand adventure. There was something else in Disney World that genuinely lifted my spirits more, much more, then I would have imagined going into it. That, It’s A Small World After All mentality that pervaded everything there.
Sniff at the Disney-esq sentimentality if you like…but it gave my soul a much needed boost to face the real world outside the gates (where I later learned hundreds had been killed in by terrorists in India…). I’d thought of it as escapism. It isn’t. It’s taking a break. You just can’t let the world bear down on you constantly without going nuts. It’s good to have somewhere you can go to remember your dreams, and why they were good, and let the power of those dreams lift you once more.
So it should not surprise the Kultur Krieger that Disney of all mainstream American icons, is being gay friendly. For one thing, they’re in the hospitality business, not the beat your neighbor over the head with ballot initiatives business. For another, Disney has always believed in the better tomorrow, and in the power of dreams. If all that is a fairy tale, I’ll take it over the one George Bush, James Dobson, and the Mormon church are selling to America these days.
It isn’t cheap by any means, but same-sex couples can have that magic moment now too. They can exchange vows by the shores of a beautiful lagoon, with Cinderella’s Castle in the background. Everything will be just right, perfect even, like a dream come true.
Then they can go forward together, back into the world, breath their life into it, and make the dream real…
A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes Come True
by Harrison Ellenshaw
Get Your Deeply Held Religious Beliefs Off My Back
Of course, while I was away in a private little world where everyone gets along, the fallout from Proposition H8 continued in full force. As it should. A lot of people are claiming they have a duty to strip gay people of their civil rights because their religion tells them to. But they had another duty, as Americans, to stand up for liberty and justice for all. We have seen time and again in this KulturKrieg, how religion is used as a wedge, to separate Americans from one another, for the benefit of the haters of the American dream. Charles De Gaulle once said Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first. That applies to Christian nationalism as well.
Freedom of religion doesn’t mean you’re free to impose your religious beliefs on others. Freedom of religion means even the heathens in the church across the street have rights too. Freedom of religion means that even the people your religion brands as pariahs have rights too. Freedom of religion means we are all equals in the eyes of the law. That is how the religious outcasts of Europe once conceived of the American land they fled to, when their own beliefs were being persecuted back in the old countries. A nation of religious non-conformists, dissidents, and outcasts, cannot hold together when one group demands that its "deeply held religious beliefs" have the force of law over others. The haters of America are well aware of this.
You can be a Mormon when you pray in a Mormon church. You can be a Catholic when you pray in a Catholic church. You can be a Baptist when you pray in a Baptist church. When you walk into a voting booth, you must be an American. The American prayer is for liberty and justice for All, or America simply cannot be anymore. If that offends your deeply held religious beliefs, find another country. Because what you want to live in is a theocracy, not a democracy. You can be a Christian, or a Mormon, first, before anything else, anywhere and everywhere but in the voting booth. In the voting booth, you must be an American first.
When Are Your "Privately Held Religious Beliefs" Not So Private Anymore?
Posted by Dan Savage on Wed, Nov 26 at 10:44 AM
When you donate $1500 to a political campaign to strip other people — people who are not your co-religionists — of their civil rights. Richard Raddon is, or was, the director of the Los Angeles Film Festival. All hell broke loose after it emerged that Raddon, who is Mormon, had donated $1500 to the "Yes on 8" campaign. The LA Times:
After Raddon’s contribution was made public online, Film Independent was swamped with criticism from "No on 8" supporters both inside and outside the organization. Within days, Raddon offered to step down as festival director, but the board, which includes Don Cheadle, Forest Whitaker, Lionsgate President Tom Ortenberg and Fox Searchlight President Peter Rice, gave him a unanimous vote of confidence.
Yet, the anti-Raddon bile continued to bubble in the blogosphere, and according to one Film Independent board member, "No on 8" supporters also berated Raddon personally via phone calls and e-mails. The recriminations ultimately proved too much, and when Raddon offered to resign again, this time the board accepted.
Raddon released a statement that said, in part, "I have always held the belief that all people, no matter race, religion or sexual orientation, are entitled to equal rights." Except for when they’re not — and Raddon also believes that the religious should wield a veto over other peoples’ civil rights. He goes on to whine about being a "devout and faithful Mormon," and about how his contribution to "Yes on 8" was a "private matter." Uh… no. A donation to a political campaign is a public matter; and civil marriage rights for same-sex couples did not infringe upon the religious freedom of Mormons, devout or otherwise.
Bill Condon, the gay guy who directed Dreamgirls, attempted to get Raddon’s back: "Someone has lost his job and possibly his livelihood because of privately held religious beliefs."
No. No. No. Raddon lost his job due to criticism of his public political actions, not his private religious beliefs, and his public political actions were a part of the public record. If Raddon wanted to go to church and pray his little heart out against same-sex marriage, or proselytize on street corners against gay marriage, or counsel gay men to leave their husbands and marry nice Mormon girls instead, that could be viewed as an expression of his "privately held religious beliefs." Instead he helped fund a political campaign to strip a vulnerable minority group of its civil rights.
"Millions of Californians definitely lost their civil rights," says John Aravosis. "But I’m not hearing a lot of concern about any of those victims, only sympathy for their attacker. When you use the power of the state to rip away my civil rights, and force me to live by your ‘values,’ you are no longer practicing your religion. You’re practicing politics."
In the wake of Prop 8 millions of gays and lesbians all over the country have decided that we’re no longer going to play by the old rules. We’re not going to let people kick our teeth down our throats and then run and hide behind "Nothing personal — just my private religious beliefs!" That game’s over.
That game’s over. When you advocate for this or that as a matter of law you are not practicing religion…you are practicing politics. And when you attempt to use the laws all Americans must live by, to bash your neighbor and elevate yourself, you are not a patriot but a nationalist.
This is the second time I have seen in the news since Proposition H8 passed, a Mormon who while working side by side with other gay people, first in the theater, and now in films, gave serious money to cut their ring fingers off. One-thousand, five hundred dollars is not pocket change. You just don’t give that kind of money to something like this, simply because your church tells you to donate. That’s the kind of money you give, when you really, really want the measure to pass. This was not simply religious obedience on his part. He was serious about it. That money became a knife in the back of every gay person he knows, every gay person he ever worked with, every gay person whose creative talent and energy gave him the means to earn a living.
What you have to understand about this fight, is that it isn’t about marriage. It’s about love. Gay people, must not be allowed to love and be loved in return. They must not be allowed to have that intimate other in their lives, that companion of the heart to walk through the years with, side-by-side, soul to soul. To allow us to marry is to aknowledge that homosexuals love, and that cannot be. But when you take the possibility of love away from someone, what is left? What is left, to council peace, compassion and sympathy when rage fills the empty space where love once lived?
Do they really think, at long last, that we are not human? What Raddon got was precisely what he asked for. A world without love, without compassion, without sympathy, without peace. Congratulations Richard. Mission Accomplished.
I was only five minutes out of Disney World and moving down the Interstate when I decided to tune in OutQ on the car’s Sirius radio, and happened to get the hourly news, and hearing about the ongoing fight over Proposition H8 was all it took to make me angry, livid even, all over again.
You know…there was more to growing up with Walt Disney’s Wonderful World on the TV then the cartoons and the Disney-esq storylines. There was a sense to much of what Disney did, that, yes, it’s a small world after all, that the future was bright with promise, that technological progress was a thing to be embraced and that the study of science was good for us, part of a well balanced education.
I spent most of my time in Epcot, but a little also in Magic Kingdom, in Tomorrowland. There was a cute little Tomorrowland poster at the Main Street U.S.A. entrance to the Magic Kingdom, that read The Future That Never Was Is Finally Here. Tomorrowland is one great big nod to the retro-future of the 1950s and 60s. But at its core is this almost childlike sense of progress, grounded in knowledge, leading to a wonderful tomorrow. It was the sense of the future I grew up with. And I’m here to tell you, after eight years of George Bush and the religious right and their Republican enabler’s cultural war on reason, knowledge and science, it was exhilarating to have it served up to me again, unselfconsciously and unapologetically….like it was just everyday common sense.
I rode the Spaceship Earth exhibit at the entrance to Epcot. You get on a set of moving carts that work pretty much like other Disney “people mover” technologies. The step-on station is a platform that moves along with the carts. The carts never stop, but the access platform moves along with them so it’s a simple matter to get onto one. Once in the cart you sit in front of a touch screen video display which asks you for your language and place of origin, which it uses to tailor the narrative guide specifically to you. Each seat in the carts has its own set of speakers, and you only hear your own guide. The ride chronicles the progress of human communication, and the sharing of knowledge, from the stone age to modern times. The most soul-satisfying moments of my stay at Disney World, where those moments spent seeing the grand arc of the human story laid out before me as a great adventure, without concession to fundamentalist demands for biblical correctness. Time and again I walked through Disney World stunned, absolutely stunned, that here in the United States of America in the 21st century, kids are more likely to see in an amusement park then in their own schools, archeological and scientific facts not only told truthfully, but the pursuit of those truths seen as a great and wonderful adventure. I don’t think it’s just Disney’s gay friendliness that has the fundamentalists pissed off.
Sniff at all the staff (excuse me…Cast Members…) walking around the park in character costumes if you like. But that It’s A Small World After All mentality pervades everything in Disney World and after so many years of relentless scorched earth republican party assaults on tolerance and diversity, it was wonderful to stay for a while in a place where those things were just taken as a given. There was no preaching of diversity, it was just always there in the background, especially in Epcot. But even in Downtown Disney, which is more like a shopping plaza then a park, there was a holiday display that showcased all the different ways different cultures celebrated at this time of year. Yes, there was also “Christmas” everywhere. I went to “Micky’s Christmas Party” in Magic Kingdom Thursday night, a special event with a Santa parade and a spectacular fireworks display over Cinderella’s Castle (see below). But it was more a celebration of the holiday spirit, and believing in your own dreams, then any particular religion. There were in fact, no references to religion at all. Anywhere. Except to acknowledge, respectfully, even cheerfully, that different people have different beliefs. It’s A Small World After All. James Dobson would have hated it. He’d have joined hands with Maleficent onstage to try and tear it all down so that people won’t believe in their dreams anymore.
Walt Disney was a man of his times, and his magic kingdom was born after the second world war and at the beginning of the first American space age, when we were just learning how to launch humans into space and bring them back alive. There was so much we were going to do, and that we still haven’t. So much Walt Disney wanted to do too. Epcot wasn’t originally planned as a theme park. It was Walt’s Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow. Having finally had my first hand look at what he accomplished with his theme park, I find it tragic he didn’t get a chance to realize his original dream for EPCOT. Cigarettes killed him before he could. But I think he would have done it had he lived.
And…thing of it is…had he accomplished EPCOT…so many many years ahead of its time…it would be a city today, perfectly, absolutely perfectly positioned to withstand the impact of rising energy costs. Here (in three parts) is a film that Walt produced to get investors to buy into his planned city of tomorrow. The quality on this copy is not wonderful, but it gets it across. These days you hear a lot about making cities and communities “walkable” and investing in more and better public transport. In EPCOT as originally planned, the pedestrian was going to be king. Various Disney developed “people mover” technologies were to be employed to get you from one place to another. The only reason you’d need a car in EPCOT, would be if you wanted to go visit someplace else.
“…their schools will welcome new ideas, so that everyone who grows up in EPCOT will have skills in pace with today’s world.”
I haven’t heard anyone seriously talk about schools and ideas and living in today’s world like that since Reagan began putting the knife into the New Deal. I was fortunate to enter school sometime just after Sputnik scared the hell out of the U.S. and suddenly giving kids a good science education was a vital national security thing and to hell with the fundamentalist vote. I grew up in a world where science and rationality and the pursuit of knowledge and understanding had respected and valued places in school and in society and in our dreams of tomorrow. It was either that, or let the Soviets plant their flag on the moon, and in effect, declare their ownership of space. You know…that place where all the missiles fly on their way to our cities.
Maybe it wasn’t all do-able exactly the way it was envisioned back then, but the spirit of the times is what matters more then its vision of what tomorrow would look like. Tomorrow is always different then you imagined it. But once upon a time we were all allowed to dream about making tomorrow better then today. We could envision a better world someday. The fundamentalists hate that dream. They want to take it away from us. All of us…not just gay people. We can’t be allowed to dream that dream. Because their dream is about the world coming to an end.
So I spent a while in Disney World. I saw Cinderella’s Castle and Micky and Donald and the Genie and I rode Spaceship Earth. I saw planet Earth float over the world showcase lagoon while its continents told in pictures the story of life, and the human journey from African savannas to the seas…and then the skys…
We can see a new horizon
built on all that we have done
and our dreams begin another
thousand circles ’round the sun
And I rode The Carousel of Progress…
There’s a great big beautiful tomorrow
Shining at the end of ev’ryday
There’s a great big beautiful tomorrow
And tomorrow’s just a dream away
…and I was able to remember the old dream once again. Sniff at the Disney-esq sentimentality all you want…I used to…but I swear I won’t anymore. I have lived through decades of this culture war and it is precisely this sentiment that the fundamentalists want to make us all forget, kill in our hearts forever, so they can get back down to the business of bringing a world they have always hated to an end.
I am so glad I went. And not just because I got to see a certain someone I haven’t seen face to face in decades. Got to see him smile too…
The Mormon Amendment To The California Constitution
The more people look at what happened in California, the more the vast scope of Mormon involvement in anti-gay politics, both in terms of money and organizational prowess, becomes known. In this article in Today’s New York Times, the bottom line is made perfectly clear: without the vigorous support of the Mormon church, Proposition 8 would have failed. The Mormon church wrote its will into the constitution of the state of California though lies and stealth, and lots and lots of money that its members were ordered to contribute…
As proponents of same-sex marriage across the country planned protests on Saturday against the ban, interviews with the main forces behind the ballot measure showed how close its backers believe it came to defeat — and the extraordinary role Mormons played in helping to pass it with money, institutional support and dedicated volunteers.
“We’ve spoken out on other issues, we’ve spoken out on abortion, we’ve spoken out on those other kinds of things,” said Michael R. Otterson, the managing director of public affairs for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormons are formally called, in Salt Lake City. “But we don’t get involved to the degree we did on this.”
…
Jeff Flint, another strategist with Protect Marriage, estimated that Mormons made up 80 percent to 90 percent of the early volunteers who walked door-to-door in election precincts.
The canvass work could be exacting and highly detailed. Many Mormon wards in California, not unlike Roman Catholic parishes, were assigned two ZIP codes to cover. Volunteers in one ward, according to training documents written by a Protect Marriage volunteer, obtained by people opposed to Proposition 8 and shown to The New York Times, had tasks ranging from “walkers,” assigned to knock on doors; to “sellers,” who would work with undecided voters later on; and to “closers,” who would get people to the polls on Election Day.
Suggested talking points were equally precise. If initial contact indicated a prospective voter believed God created marriage, the church volunteers were instructed to emphasize that Proposition 8 would restore the definition of marriage God intended.
But if a voter indicated human beings created marriage, Script B would roll instead…
…
…the “Yes” side also initially faced apathy from middle-of-the-road California voters who were largely unconcerned about same-sex marriage. The overall sense of the voters in the beginning of the campaign, Mr. Schubert said, was “Who cares? I’m not gay.”
To counter that, advertisements for the “Yes” campaign also used hypothetical consequences of same-sex marriage, painting the specter of churches’ losing tax exempt status or people “sued for personal beliefs” or objections to same-sex marriage, claims that were made with little further explanation.
Another of the advertisements used video of an elementary school field trip to a teacher’s same-sex wedding in San Francisco to reinforce the idea that same-sex marriage would be taught to young children.
“We bet the campaign on education,” Mr. Schubert said.
They lied through their teeth and they threw a torrent of hate and Mormon church money into it and they steamrollered over the rights of devoted loving couples so they could become gods in their own universe someday. And now they’re upset that people are taking the fight back to them.
Mr. Ashton described the protests by same-sex marriage advocates as off-putting. “I think that shows colors,” Mr. Ashton said. “By their fruit, ye shall know them.”
And just what would you do, you gutter crawling bigot, if someone cut your ring finger off? Laugh it off? Shake the other guy’s hand? No you wouldn’t. But you expect us to roll over and play dead because we’re homosexuals and homosexuals don’t have feelings, and homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. There is no reason for us to be angry with you, because you didn’t take anything sacred away from us, because we don’t feel love the way you do, because we’re not human like you are. We’re Satan’s followers, and we don’t have human emotions like you Future Gods In Training do.
Fruit…did you say? Fuck you Ashton. I’ve got your fruit right here. You sow poison in the earth, you get poison back out of it. Now eat it. Or as another gay man, James Baldwin once said…
People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
Baldwin wouldn’t have been allowed in one of your churches, even if he wasn’t gay, because according to your…prophets…black people were cursed by God and that’s why their skin is black. Your church has been elevating the cheapshit prejudices of its barstool prophets into holy writ for generations and now and a reckoning is long overdue. This isn’t your private universe, it’s the United States of America and it belongs to all of us, not just you White And Delightsome Gods In Waiting. The United States of America is not your private universe, and you are not gods, however highly you might think of yourselves. So fuck off.
Via Atrios… I’m going to be like a damn broken record for the next couple of years telling people that their gay and lesbian neighbors have been seeing all this for decades already. I just know it …
I used to have an idea of what a "good faith debate" was; that was in 1999. My general feeling now is that a liberal who says "fuck" a lot is one who got mugged by a conservative who pretended to be interested in a "good faith debate."
Now you know why this blog contains a lot of cursing.
I am going to insist here upon the grouchy perspective: I do not believe that there is any such thing as a "conservative intellectual," never mind one who is "thoughtful" or "sane." I contend that "conservatism" in its 21st century incarnation is nothing more or less than a particularly ill-conceived social formation based upon pernicious doxa. Or to be blunt, it is stupid identity politics. Sound unfair? Well then. To be a conservative nowadays and not be Cast Forth from the Tribe, you need to believe:
1. Anthropogenic climate change is a Lie.
2. The "Main Stream Media" has a partisan bias in favor of Democrats.
3. The invasion of Iraq was based on an honest appraisal of the evidence.
4. Torture is acceptable, and also, we do not torture.
I could go on, but these will do to make the point. To be a conservative in the 21st century American sense, you need to believe things that are not true, and you need to tie yourself into knots to pretend otherwise.
You could go on? Oh…get me started… How about:
Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.
The average homosexual relationship only lasts a few days.
The average homosexual has thousands of sexual partners in a lifetime.
Homosexuality is a mental illness. The APA only removed it from the list of mental illnesses because of protests by militant homosexuals.
Homosexuals have more money then everyone else.
Gay Liberation caused AIDS.
The Nazis were all homosexuals.
So were the communists.
No society that tolerated homosexuality ever lasted very long. Homosexuality caused the fall of Rome.
No society has ever allowed same sex marriage.
Same sex marriage will cause heterosexuals to stop getting married.
If same sex marriage is legalized, churches will be forced to marry homosexuals.
If same sex marriage is legalized, people will be jailed for speaking out against homosexuality.
If same sex marriage is legalized, the human race will die out.
If same sex marriage is legalized, homosexuals will be allowed to recruit children in kindergarten.
All homosexuals are pedophiles.
Homosexuality is the result of being molested as a child. All homosexuals were once molested.
Homosexuality is the result of poor parenting.
Male homosexuality is the result of failure to bond with the father.
Lesbianism is the result of failure to bond with the father.
Poor Fathering is the cause of all homosexuality.
No…wait…it’s overbearing mothers.
No…it’s godlessness…
…and so on. Get me started. And here’s the thing…It doesn’t matter that none of this is true. The point is, this is their Belief. Beliefs don’t have to be true. Accepting the Belief identifies you as being part of their tribe. That’s what’s important. Not that the Belief is true, but that you are either in the tribe, or an outsider. To put it into gang terminology, these are their colors. Wearing them identifies you as a member of the gang.
This is why rational discussion with these people is impossible. It’s not about what is true and what isn’t. It’s about defending the tribe against outsiders. We in the reality based community are always wrong, because we are outsiders. Their colors have to be stronger then our colors, because the most important thing on earth isn’t what is true and what is not…the most important thing on earth is defending the tribe against outsiders.
But when true and false stop being your guide to right and wrong, then you just walk eyes wide open into a pit. Why did the bottom fall out of the economy all of a sudden? Why did the splendid little war in Iraq that was only supposed to take a few days drag on and on and on and kill thousands? Facts, as it so happens, matter more then Belief after all. And came election day 2008, a lot of people were looking at their 401k quarterly reports, and seeing possibly for the first time, what kind of world you get when people think Belief is more important then facts, and decided it was time to kick the bums out. Facts matter.
So while I quite respect Hilzoy, I think she is dangerously mistaking the nature of movement conservatism. To go back a bit to the Tim Burke post she cites:
But I think we can all make things just ever so slightly better, make the air less poisonous, by pushing to the margins of our consciousness the crazy, bad, gutter-dwelling, two-faced, tendentious high-school debator kinds of voices out there in the public sphere, including and especially in blogs. Let them stew in their own juices, without the dignity of a reply, now that their pipelines to people with real political power have been significantly cut.
Tempting, but absolutely wrong. In the 1990s this was a fashionable attitude towards the crazy anti-Clintonoids — against whom the best and the brightest on the left failed to mobilize. This failure occurred because Clinton was, well, not really very far to the left, so why defend him? But it was also because it was assumed that Clinton could take care of himself. Which he could. But what happened underneath…? Well, the foundations were laid for the Bush administration, that’s what. The media in particular had their own institutional biases manipulated, with almost no pushback from liberals, who should have known better, but let themselves by and large get rolled. Where did the 21st century wingnuts come from? The 1990s. The case rests. And then throws up.
It seems to me that there is a powerful, but foolish, desire on the part of certain liberals, especially academic liberals, to want to engage in a nice, friendly, open debate with "conservatives." This is an error. You will always lose a game you do not realize you are playing.
Bingo. They are not about debating anything…they’re on a mission from God. They’re fighting a culture war where right and wrong are measured in terms of what is good for the party. It’s way past time to call this for what it is, and fight it for what it is. Assuming good faith only allows the other side to keep pretending they’re something they aren’t. What we are up against are theocrats and other sorts of totalitarians who think the "radical individualism" of the American Dream must be defeated by any means necessary. We can all just stop pretending now, that the divisiveness of the past few decades is about two different visions of America…one liberal, one conservative. It isn’t. We are fighting an enemy as old as the first tyrants, and just as bereft of scruples. At rock bottom, these people are thieves, who want to steal everything precious from our lives, not so much to fatten their own, as to make sure we never feel the joy of life more then they ever could.
When I finished my remarks, it was question time, and the first question was: “But you’re not gay!?” I must radiate a kind of straight guy dumpiness that no self-respecting gay man would be caught dead displaying in public.
Anyway, I took it to mean, “So why do you care about this?” and gave an answer I’ve always been proud of.
“I see it through a Jewish perspective,” I said. “I see you guys as another loathed minority trying to get through the day.”
Which they are. Readers complain to me that homosexuality isn’t a God-given condition, but a sinful choice, and I always respond, “It is? A choice? Really? I couldn’t choose it. Could you?” They never have a good answer to that.
The look-how-far-we’ve-come aspect of Obama’s triumph was mitigated by citizens in California, Florida and Arizona voting to bar gay marriage. An awful intrusion of government into the private sphere, one we would never tolerate if it didn’t touch upon the American obsession with sex. I mean, we’d never ban gays from holding fishing licenses, arguing that they somehow spoil the fishing experience for the rest of us.
But religious conservatives have cooked up this palpable lie about gays and marriage, based on nothing at all, and the public has accepted it because it tickles the unexamined biases they already have.
Just like civil rights, this is a generational war that will be won, I have absolutely no doubt, in the fullness of time. But not yet.
Emphasis mine. And actually…time was a homosexual might not be allowed even a fishing license. Time was you could be denied all kinds of professional licenses if you were known to be homosexual. You could have your plumber’s license taken away. Your license to practice medicine. You could be fired, evicted, rounded up by the cops in your local bar, or just walking down the street in some places, and tossed into jail.
The marriage barrier is a bitter, lingering part of all that. It isn’t marriage they want to protect. It’s the right to persecute homosexuals. They can’t just round us up and toss us in jail anymore. But they can still torment loving couples…still remind us that a whole human life is not ours to have…still drive the knife into our hearts every now and then, so they can feel good about themselves.
For the first time since the end of 1994, we can have normal politics and policymaking–can discuss what policies are best for America, and what America should be.
You see, from the end of 1994 to the end of 2000, the Republican congressional majority’s single fixed idea was that nothing should happen that could be portrayed as a success for Bill Clinton. And from the end of 2000 to today, the executive branch was controlled by a gang of malevolent, immoral, and destructive thugs that have disgraced the United States of America.
We can finally have normal politics and policymaking again. That’s not a tremendous accomplishment, is it?
It feels like one…
Yes. Yes it does. Or will…when I can get around to feeling it myself. Having lived under the cloud of republican party radicalism for decades now, it’s going to be hard to come back out of the bomb shelter, so to speak, and look around without feeling nervous.
If you want to know what Barack Obama’s magic was, it was simple. He ran as a democrat. In the New York Times, columnist Roger Cohen writes…
Beyond Iraq, beyond the economy, beyond health care, there was something even more fundamental at stake in this U.S. election won by Barack Obama: the self-respect of the American people.
For almost eight years, Americans have seen words stripped of meaning, lives sacrificed to confront nonexistent Iraqi weapons and other existences ravaged by serial incompetence on an epic scale.
Against all this, Obama made a simple bet and stuck to it. If you trusted in the fundamental decency, civility and good sense of the American people, even at the end of a season of fear and loss, you could forge a new politics and win the day.
Four years ago, at the Democratic convention, in the speech that lifted him from obscurity, Obama said: “For alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American saga: a belief that we are connected as one people.”
He never wavered from that theme. “In this country, we rise or fall as one nation, as one people,” he declared Tuesday night in his victory speech to a joyous crowd in Chicago.
But this is the democratic party ideal in a nutshell ever since FDR.
It is nothing new. What’s different this time, is that a democrat actually ran on it. Republicans have been trying to utterly destroy FDR’s New Deal ever since he passed away toward the end of the great war he had guided the nation through. But this is still FDR’s America. His vision that we are all one America, whether rich or poor, factory or farm worker or white collar manager, eastern, western and everywhere in between, still resonates with us.
It is the American dream, that diverse people of many faiths, descendants of many nations, can still be a people in spite of their differences, because of a shared vision of liberty and justice for all. The tragedy of my lifetime is that the democratic party came to believe decades of republican propaganda, that America was not one nation after all, but a winner-take-all playing field where only the most ruthless, the most greedy, could win if they carved out of it just the right voter block.
And all it took to crush them, was someone willing to take up the dream again, and remind us what it was once upon a time, to still believe in it…
In that four-year span, Obama never got angry. Without breaking a sweat, he took down two of the most ruthless political machines on the planet: first the Clintons and then the Republican Party.
An idea has power. John McCain had many things in this campaign, but an idea was not one of them. At a time of economic crisis, he could not order his thoughts about it. Hard-hit Ohio drew its decisive conclusions. It was not alone.
McCain flailed, opting on a whim for a sidekick, Sarah Palin, who personified the very “country-first” intolerance and Bush-like small-mindedness of which many Americans had grown as weary as the world has.
The divisions the republicans have been sowing in the amber waves won’t be soon healed. But now we can begin a start on it. People Are tired of it. Not everyone surely. The christianists. The bigots. The greedy. But they have always been the hangers-on. There is an aching in the land for a way out of the culture wars, and a return to business as usual. That’s where we can make a start. At last. At long last.
I voted here in San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighborhood about two hours ago. It took about an hour to get through the line, and while standing there I was chatting with the 75-year-old retired cop in front of me, and the young 30-something gay couple in front of him, who had their two little girls in tow.
Everyone was in good spirits as the conversation moved from the Obama-McCain contest to the farce that is Sarah Palin, and then on to non-political matters, like the road work being done on the next block. The conversation between the cop and the couple started to get animated toward the end of our hour in line as the three men began to discuss the current football season, wagering bets for this weekend’s games and making predictions for the Super Bowl.
And then, as we entered the firehouse that doubled as our polling place, as the couple and their daughters stepped out of line and up to the table to receive their ballots, I observed the cop in front of me. He opened his sample ballot, took out his pen, scribbled out his "yes" vote on Proposition 8, and filled in the ballot line for "no."
I don’t think he knew that I observed him. And since it was such a private moment I held back my tears of joy and my overwhelming desire to pat him on the back and say "thank you, sir." Instead, I left the polling place muttering to myself those two words you have repeated over and over during this election cycle, Andrew:
Four years ago my husband and I adopted a nine-year-old boy. He’d been taken from his biological family when he was three and shuttled through six different foster homes in six years. The three of us have worked very hard to create our family. Our son has added to our lives in ways we could never have imagined. We love him very much.
This year our son, who is now thirteen, came out to us. Our son is gay. We are fine with this.
The amazing thing about our boy is that he goes to school every day and lives his life true to himself. He’s a happy child. He writes poetry. He skips. He’s a track star. He excels at algebra. He loves the Stylistics. He has a blinding smile. Most of the kids at his school love him. But some of the boys call him “faggot.” Yesterday our usually sunny boy, all five-feet-four inches of him, came home staring at the ground, visibly upset. Some of the boys at school were taunting him with cries of Yes on 8, the California proposition aimed at eliminating the right to marry for those who want to marry another of the same gender. The boys were punished by the school, but the damage was done.
Who are these followers of Jesus Christ who would tell my son, taken from his family at three, and homeless until he was nine, that he cannot marry and have a family of his own?
Today my thirteen-year-old son joined me in the voting booth. As I voted for Obama my son put his hand on top of mine. He did the same thing when I voted no on Proposition 8. He was late for school, but I can’t think of a better reason.
Please Donate to No On 8. And if you live in California, please be sure to vote on Tuesday. Take nothing for granted. As the saying goes, pray as though everything depends on God, but act as though everything depends on you. In an election this close, your vote Will make a difference. So please…vote…so that love can have a chance in this world.
After the rally, we witnessed a near-street riot involving the exiting McCain crowd and two Cuban-American Obama supporters. Tony Garcia, 63, and Raul Sorando, 31, were suddenly surrounded by an angry mob. There is a moment in a crowd when something goes from mere yelling to a feeling of danger, and that’s what we witnessed. As photographers and police raced to the scene, the crowd elevated from stable to fast-moving scrum, and the two men were surrounded on all sides as we raced to the circle.
The event maybe lasted a minute, two at the most, before police competently managed to hustle the two away from the scene and out of the danger zone. Only FiveThirtyEight tracked the two men down for comment, a quarter mile down the street.
"People were screaming ‘Terrorist!’ ‘Communist!’ ‘Socialist!’" Sorando said when we caught up with him. "I had a guy tell me he was gonna kill me."
Asked what had precipitated the event, "We were just chanting ‘Obama!’ and holding our signs. That was it. And the crowd suddenly got crazy."
I hope nobody thinks this sort of thing is going to stop after election day. What you need to understand is they’re not trying to win the election anymore. I really believe that choosing Palin was for inciting the base for war on an Obama administration they had come to believe was a certainty. They know this time the fighting will be harder then it was to destroy Clinton because the democratic grassroots, if not the leadership, is organized and ready for it this time. Expecting it even. And maybe they’ve taken the measure of Obama in their private conferences and figured that he’s no Bill Clinton. So they’re stoking the gutter full of hate, because the gutter is all they have left to win with. That’s why it was Palin. People are shaking their heads wondering how McCain could pick the likes of her to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. But he didn’t pick her to be vice president. Her job is to be gasoline on the fire.
What we’re seeing now isn’t the last ugly gasp of a failed presidential campaign, but the start of the scorched earth after-the-election knife fight for the next four years, if not longer. I’ve been saying for years now that the shit doesn’t really hit the fan until the republicans begin loosing power. In the coming years, it won’t only be gay people getting bashed on the streets of America. Just so you know.
Welcome to the reality your gay and lesbian neighbors have been living with for decades now. You knew it had to be you next didn’t you.
Via Atrios… If this is true, then maybe it means that voters have finally become fed up enough with the republican strategy of winning elections by alienating Americans from one another, that they’re willing now at long last to punish them at the polls for it.
North Carolina Congressman Robin Hayes, reeling from recent remarks about "Liberals hating real Americans," has lost his lead in North Carolina’s 8th Congressional District race.
Hayes trails Democrat Larry Kissell 51-46 in a poll released Tuesday by Raleigh’s Public Policy Polling. In its last NC-8 poll in August, PPP had the incumbent Hayes leading by five points.
You can argue that the republican party has a lot to answer for, in terms of how badly they’ve damanged the economy, our moral standing abroad and the rule of law here at home. But all of that pales in comparison to this one fact: that for decades now the republicans have sought to deliberately make Americans hate one another in order to win elections.
As a young speechwriter for Richard Nixon, Patrick Buchanan once expounded upon the politics of polorization. "If we tear the country in half," Buchanan assured his boss in a perversely optimistic memo, "we can pick up the bigger half."
–J. Michael Hogan, Rhetoric and Community
And so they set about to do exactly that, inflaming bigotries and ugly passions to separate neighbor from neighbor, the better to split apart the New Deal coalition of working class urban and rural Americans, women and minorities, and replace it with a toxic wasteland of mutual hatred. And every election year that hatred had to be stoked a little bit more, and a little bit more, and a little bit more, to keep it alive, to keep Americans from voting for their hopes and dreams instead of their fears and hatreds.
The damage they have done to America goes far beyond the economy and the war. It is worse even, then the constitutional damage Bush has done while in office. Those things can be fixed, with effort, in our lifetimes. The hate they have deliberately sown amongst the amber waves of grain will take generations to heal. If the republican party is to be held accountable for anything this election night, let it be for that.
[Update…] Via Atrios… From Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly…
WHEN THE GOING GETS TOUGH, THE WEAK GET RIDICULOUS…. Recent polling shows Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R) trailing in her re-election fight in North Carolina against Democrat Kay Hagan, so it stands to reason that she’s getting a little desperate.
Sen. Elizabeth Dole’s latest advertisement suggests her Democratic opponent, Kay Hagan, is a godless heathen.
"A leader of the Godless Americans PAC recently held a secret fundraiser for Kay Hagan," the 30-second spot says, showing footage of the group’s members talking about their atheist beliefs on cable news.
"Godless Americans and Kay Hagan. She hid from cameras. Took godless money," the ad concludes. "What did Kay Hagan promise in return?"
At the very end of the ad, a voice sounding like Hagan’s says: "There is no God."
Seriously, Dole used a Hagan impersonator to make voters think she’s an atheist.
It’s hard to know where to start with an ad this deplorable. First, Hagan is actually a Sunday school teacher and an elder in her church. Second, the fundraiser in question was co-hosted by 40 people, one of whom is on the board of an atheist political action committee. Third, there’s nothing scandalous about non-believers.
And fourth, what the hell is "godless money"?
Hagan held a press conference this morning with her family and pastor to denounce the ad, and announced that if Dole didn’t pull the ad, she would seek a cease-and-desist order.
Even in a campaign cycle filled with sleazy, deplorable attacks, Dole has disgraced herself in a way few thought possible.
Possible? Possible? If you’d spent the last couple decades as a gay man, living under the kinds of attacks on your person that republicans just take for granted as normal conversation, you’d know goddamned well what the kook pews are capable of. There is no bottom in that gutter. That’s what you need to understand. There is no bottom.
That if you put someone on the teevee who reflected the views of the sizable chunk of the country they would have a big audience.
Brian Williams couldn’t do it. Neither could Joe Scarborough, Rita Cosby, Dan Abrams, Ashleigh Banfield, Deborah Norville or Alan Keyes.
But MSNBC’s new 9pmET show did. The Rachel Maddow show topped CNN’s Larry King Live in the ad-friendly A25-54 demo during the month of October. King still wins the Total Viewer crown and FNC’s Hannity & Colmes is #1 in both measurements.
All that ad money lost because you didn’t listen to my advice to provide companion programming for K.O.
And you bet your ass that if NBC was just a television network they’d have rushed to where the viewers were faster then the speed of light. But NBC isn’t just a television network. It’s a subsidiary of The General Electric Corporation. In addition to all those household appliances they make, GE also happens to be a major Defense Department contractor…one of those pieces of the military industrial complex president Eisenhower once warned the nation about. So what if nobody but other right wingers watch their extremist pundits? They get the message out, and NBC can make up the loss with their other programming.
Once upon a time, the major TV networks viewed their news divisions as something of a loss, or at best a break-even part of the whole. But they let them have a degree of independence because the airwaves were seen as a public trust, even by corporations like RCA. They still mostly skewed to the Establishment line, but there was enough respect for the place actual journalism has in a democracy, that reporting the facts usually won out over sticking to the party line. No more. The minute Rachel Maddow looks like she’s having a measurable impact on the Narrative the show will be pulled, just like they pulled Donahue and Moyers.
Welcome To Planet Earth Mr. Greenspan. And How Was Your Stay On Planet Rand…?
In my college years I succumbed to the rhetoric of Ayn Rand. So did a lot of folks, some well before me. Alan Greenspan for one, who was at one time a member of her inner circle. I became a Libertarian. Fiercely so. But to my credit I think, I never let my new found ideology interpret reality for me. Eventually Ronald Reagan showed me what sort of people make money synonymous with morality, and the kind of government we were likely to end up with with them in charge. So I shrugged…and left both Rand and her bastard child, the Libertarian party. Is it so insufferably arrogant of me to say that I’ve been waiting for the rest of them to wise up ever since?
For years, a Congressional hearing with Alan Greenspan was a marquee event. Lawmakers doted on him as an economic sage. Markets jumped up or down depending on what he said. Politicians in both parties wanted the maestro on their side.
But on Thursday, almost three years after stepping down as chairman of the Federal Reserve, a humbled Mr. Greenspan admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets and had failed to anticipate the self-destructive power of wanton mortgage lending.
“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
I had my Damascus moment twenty years ago you drooling moron and it was called the Silverado Savings and Loan Scandal. You could have seen then if you’d just taken a look at it, that what happens when financial institutions are deregulated is a mad rush to stuff other people’s, mostly working people’s money into their pockets. Self interest after all, is about Self, not about the institution you work for, let alone the communities they serve. It doesn’t matter if the whole shitpile collapses if you can get out of it with enough cash to live in the lap of luxury for the rest of your life, does it? If self-interest is all there is to it, then you’ve done pretty good haven’t you…even if thousands of other people had to loose everything so you could live high on the hog.
Greed is, contrary to Randian dogma, Not Good. Ambition is good. But ambition is self actualizing. You want to become something. Something better. Greed is just wanting what someone else has. There was a time when I believed that Rand’s attempt to redefine Greed as Ambition was just an artifact of her not knowing English natively. But no…she knew what she was doing. It was from the beginning, all about raping the working class for the benefit of the rich and powerful. Her revenge for the communist appropriation of her father’s pharmacy. If she couldn’t stick it to the Russian proletariat, she could at least help the rich here in America carpet their mansions with the life savings of working Americans. She raised a generation on her Greed Is Good religion. And when they got the power they craved, they put her ideas into practice. The only practice they could have been put to. The only practice they were ever meant to be put to…
Along with the rest of America, Rep. George Miller has watched the value of his retirement investments plummet in recent weeks.
"I’ve lost 30 percent like everybody else. This hits home with the Miller family, too," the California Democrat said in a recent interview.
In recent years, Congress has promoted the dramatic movement in corporate America away from defined-benefit pensions to 401(k)s with policies encouraging automatic enrollment and raising contribution limits. Under 401(k) plans employees contribute to their own investment accounts and assume the risks and rewards that go with them. Lately, with the crisis on Wall Street and across the globe, it’s been more risk than reward.
Earlier this month, Miller’s House Education and Labor Committee found that Americans’ retirement plans, pension plans and 401(k)s included, have lost as much as $2 trillion in the past 15 months– about 20 percent of their value. At a committee hearing Wednesday in San Francisco, Miller cited new research suggesting that the losses might be as much as double that.
And they almost got Social Security during the Bush administration too. Remember that? They were going to let individuals "invest" their retirement money. Basically, give it to Wall Street to play with. It was going to be better then Social Security…just like our 401ks were going to be better then real pensions. When the butcher’s bill for decades of Randian inspired market deregulation is added up, a lot of folks are going to be Real Glad they didn’t get their hands on that trust fund too.
In the coming years, as the folks who lined their pockets during the past few decades with other people’s life savings are made to pay some of it pack, there is going to be a lot of bellyaching from the high and mighty about class warfare. As though they haven’t been engaging in it themselves. Once upon a time the robber barons lived by the simple maxim that might makes right. If they thought of it at all in moralistic terms they saw themselves as a kind of Darwinism in action…survival of the fittest and all that. Then Rand came along and told them that anyone who isn’t rich is a leach on those who are. Capitalism, by which she meant the unrestrained greed motive of the rich and powerful, was not only the best economic system, it was the only Moral one. Now in the higher echelons of wealth, raping the rest of us isn’t merely something you do because you can. Now it’s your moral obligation.
But no amount of apologetics can make what is essentially a pillage and conquest based economic model work for very long, now that we’re not living in caves anymore. Cooperation is necessary. Trust is necessary. For there to be rewards for industriousness, there also need to be guards against perdition. The marketplace needs a cop on the block, or it simply degenerates into gang warfare and shear thievery and collapses. Preying on other people, trusting people, naive people, weaker people, is not made into a workable, sustainable economic model simply by calling it good. Greed is not good.
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