Gay Americans…Republican’s Cynical Weapon Against Democrats Since Truman
You hear some folks bellyache about those "Gay Studies" curriculums in various colleges and universities. If they’re not complaining that they’re utterly worthless exercises in pointless "diversity", they’re insinuating that the courses couldn’t be about anything but how to have gay sex.
I’ve never gone through one of these curriculums myself, but if the vast treasure trove of gay history that’s out there is any measure, a Gay Studies course isn’t just a nice idea for promoting diversity, it’s an important part of the human story. Particularly here in America, where gay citizens have been a punching bag, a handy scarecrow, for every hysteria that’s ever swept through the country. Case in point, the red scare of the 1950s.
I’m only part way into David K. Johnson’s The Lavender Scare, and already its challenging some of my bedrock views of what happened to my country during the so-called McCarthy era. Far from being merely a sideshow to the communist witch hunts of the 1950s, the purges of gay Americans were central to it. And…surprise, surprise, the engine for it all was republican hunger for political power.
Right at the beginning of the book, Johnson describes, using newspaper accounts of the time, interviews, and newly declassified documents, how the republicans in the late 1940s, out of power since Hoover brought on the great depression, saw the issue of homosexuals in government as a useful weapon against the party in power.
They orchestrated a hearing in which they pressed the secretary of state for information about communists in the state department. But it was a game of tag. In the process of defending themselves against the republican charge that they had allowed communists to get and hold jobs in the state department, the democrats described how they were diligently ferreting out "security risks". Far from being lax said the democrats, they’d uncovered and removed 91 "security risks" from the state department.
Which gave the republicans an opening to press them for details. How many of those were communists? It was a question the republicans already knew the answer to, because they’d had all the details in a closed door hearing previously. What they wanted was to get it out in the open. And the democrats, backed into a corner and not wanting to leave it hanging out there that they’d let so many communists into the state department when they hadn’t actually, said, that in fact none of them were communists, nobody had been let go from the state department for disloyalty. The 91 people fired were not accused of being traitors. Just…you know…security risks. Pressed further they admitted that these people had all been fired because they were homosexuals.
That was what the republicans wanted to hear, and get into the papers. Not a communist threat, but a lavender one. Why? Because it was felt that the moral issue played even better against the democrat’s base…working class and poor Americans, then the communist threat did. In other words, it made a great wedge issue against the democrats. And right from the beginning, when Joe McCarthy began waving around his baseless claims of a vast communist conspiracy lurking in the federal government, some republicans…even in his own state…were counseling him to downplay the communist thing and play up the morals charges more, because for one thing they actually were finding homosexuals working in government agencies, but mostly because it made the voters in the democrat’s base even angrier.
McCarthy of course, didn’t take that advise. He pressed on with his communist bogyman and the question echoed in the committee chambers of capital hill, are you now, or have you ever been a communist? But while McCarthy was busy stirring up the Communist Menace and getting headlines, the republican party was busy stirring up the Homosexual Menace and a great purge began which…ironically…led to the formation of the first gay rights groups as gay people began to get tired of being kicked around and started pushing back.
Later, during the black civil rights movement, the republicans would go on to exploit white working class racial fears against the democrats in exactly the same way. But here, even as far back as the late 1940s, you can see them using the Homosexual Menace as a tool to divide and weaken the democrats. Because accusing the democrats of tolerating homosexuality worked even better then nearly anything else the republicans could throw at them…even communism. And it wouldn’t stop working, until we gay Americans, having had enough of it, took to the streets in defense of our lives.
You want to know why it’s so damn important that we make a big deal out of our sexual orientation? Why we don’t just quietly "leave it in the bedroom where it belongs"…? This is why. Because our lives were turned into cannon fodder for the power dreams of politicians and that needs to stop. This country needs to look…really look…at the character of those loud voices bearing moral crusades, waving around scarecrows that have their neighbor’s faces on them.
The moral rot that is on plain view every night on Fox News and in the many health care "town halls" going on all across the country…in the "birthers" and the "deathers"…it isn’t new. Not at all. What’s different now is the gutter that all those country club republicans began playing to back in the Truman years has taken over, and they have their own voice now in the national news media. And you need to understand this: those country club republicans would be fine, even with that, if it could keep them in power.
Perhaps you could see this just as clearly from looking at the history of race relations in America, and republican party race baiting. But the history of the struggle of gay Americans for equality and justice is American history too, and you really see what the republican crusade for "morality" and "family values" is made of when you study it.
Via Sullivan…a handy little snapshot of the state of the Union…
As the GOP declines in popularity, Fox News gains audience. Or in other words, as reality presses closer in, that subset of the American population who never saw a fact they couldn’t look right in the face and deny, is cocooning. Surprise, surprise.
What was once a cultural divide has become a chasm, bigger, and vastly more dangerous then anything the "generation gap" of the 1960s could have produced. Again, from Sullivan…
A reader writes:
I just want to share a sad story with you. Tonight I was at my regular Friday night AA meeting in LA that I have been attending for 18 years – I am a 48 year old woman. One of my oldest friends, a male with 30 years sobriety, is a Republican. I am a Democrat. Every week he talks politics with another like-minded friend. Tonight he arrived a bit later than usual, so as I gave him a hug, I said, "Thank goodness you arrived because I am sure Betty* (name changed) did not want to discuss politics with me!"
He then turned around and started screaming at me. I was so taken aback, I didn’t even know what he was screaming about at first. When I finally tuned in, he was yelling that Obama "sent the SEIU thugs to beat up the senior citizens" protesting at the health-care town hall meetings and that Obama had instructed the SEIU "if they come at you, you go at them twice as hard."
When I tried to reasonably protest this statement, he just spewed forth a tirade of vile invectives.
We were outside and there were about 30 people milling about. I was shocked, embarrassed and literally frozen in place. I managed to turn and walk away. This is a man I have known and respected for the entire length of my sobriety. I am fairly certain this friendship is over. Reasonable discourse is over. The lies and hate spread by the right-wing have won. As a side note, his wife, who is one of my best friends would not talk to me for over a month after the election in November. I am just heartbroken. Sorry, I know this is not the most well-written account, but I am so shaken, I can barely wrap my head around it.
I have an acquaintance…someone I used to call "friend" but simply cannot anymore…who nonetheless calls periodically. I wrote of my frustrations about that Here. Last time he called I ended the conversation when he started going on about how the new supreme court justice Sotomayor was a racist. Next time he calls I’ll have a simple question ready for him…
Do you think President Obama was born here in the United States?
End of story. Life is short. The American Dream is still beautiful and I believe in it and you don’t anymore. There is are lot of things Americans need to discuss with one another and hash out together and the politics of life in a democracy is you have to have those discussions and maybe even a few major arguments and in the end you compromise and you hold a vote and you get on with it. But you’re not there anymore. You’re somewhere on the dark side of the moon where not even light can penetrate. We can’t talk anymore, and to have an America Americans need to be able to talk with each other and you want to shut down the talking so everyone can listen to you scream about nothing for as long as you have the breath to scream about it. Fine. The conversation is shut down…with you. I’ll talk it out with anyone who has a gripe about what I think or what I believe, no matter how angry they are…but not with a Fox News crack addict. You drag yourself out of that gutter and maybe I will. But not before.
Via Sullivan…this little nugget from the front lines from Daily KOS…
It is, in short, a movement made up of the enfranchised and enabled; people who have gained every benefit from the politics of America and yet who feel in their very bones that they are the oppressed ones, the ones who have nothing left to lose, so rapidly is America falling away from them. It is rare to run across any movement so deeply angry — or more to the point, a movement which explicitly celebrates anger as the primary mission of their activism. They are not willing to listen to any factual evidence that contradicts their own beliefs in whatever dark conspiracies have been peddled to them; they have in fact made it their publicly proclaimed mission to block any such explanations from even being attempted.
This could be a description of the anti-gay movement in America ever since Anita Bryant. Enfranchised and enabled? Check. They have every right that their gay neighbors are fighting for. Every. Right. Feeling in their very bones that they are the oppressed ones? Check. It’s a constant refrain. Militant homosexuals are oppressing them. Somehow. But don’t ask how exactly because all you’ll get are either vague claims that their "deeply held religious beliefs" are being trampled on every time they’re told to leave gay people alone, or if not that, then outright lies. Remember this?
Another "Yes on 8" canard is that the continuation of same-sex marriage will force churches and other religious groups to perform such marriages or face losing their tax-exempt status. Proponents point to a case in New Jersey, where a Methodist-based nonprofit owned seaside land that included a boardwalk pavilion. It obtained an exemption from state property tax for the land on the grounds that it was open for public use and access. Events such as weddings — of any religion — could be held in the pavilion by reservation. But when a lesbian couple sought to book the pavilion for a commitment ceremony, the nonprofit balked, saying this went against its religious beliefs.
The court ruled against the nonprofit, not because gay rights trump religious rights but because public land has to be open to everyone or it’s not public. The ruling does not affect churches’ religious tax exemptions or their freedom to marry whom they please on their private property, just as Catholic priests do not have to perform marriages for divorced people and Orthodox synagogues can refuse to provide space for the weddings of interfaith couples. And Proposition 8 has no bearing on the issue; note that the New Jersey case wasn’t about a wedding ceremony.
We’re being oppressed…by having to live by the same rules everyone else does…
Not willing to listen to any factual evidence that contradicts their own beliefs? Check. Not only are they not willing to listen to the facts, they’ve built a multi-million dollar industry with dozens of front groups whose only job is to churn out one lie after another about gay people which they insist everyone else accept as holy writ, whereas any actual science is regarded as pro-homo propaganda. Publicly proclaimed their mission to block any actual facts from coming to light? Check. From keeping honest, factual information about sexual orientation out of schools, to keeping it out of public libraries, to keeping it off of television, there is no public space that the facts about homosexuality and sexual orientation can appear that they have not vigorously…and I mean vigorously…worked to shut it down.
This Daily KOS post could have been written years ago, decades even, about about the anti-gay culture warriors. But it isn’t about the fight over gay rights. It’s about the struggle for America…
There seems little question that something odd is going on with the healthcare debate. Foremost is the ridiculous extent to which the debate has been entirely commandeered by flagrant, outright lies — things about euthanasia, and death panels, and the like, abject propaganda peddled directly from House and Senate offices. We have had lying in our discourse since the beginning of that discourse, but it has been a long while since the fabrications have been so blatant, so absolutely without even the smallest grain of truth. To take a Republican-sponsored healthcare provision that rather innocently and uncontroversially extends insurance coverage to those that want to create their own living wills and turn it into a declaration that the government will decide every five years whether or not you should be euthanized is something out of the Protocols, or out of Saddam’s Iraq, or a mimicry of the worst and most stupid and most absurd of North Korean propaganda towards their own citizens.
Likewise, the explicit instruction to protestors not to debate, but to aggressively attempt to shut down the meetings entirely — not normal. It is perhaps the best possible approach for insurance lobbyists to take, if their goal is to protect the profits of their industry — but it is still not normal. We have always had the fringes of such speech, but I cannot recall a time it has been so celebrated as the formal solution to political debate. Certainly not by a major political party, coupled with the majority of their most popular pundits and talking heads, coupled again to lobbyist groups with long histories of corporate astroturfing. And the proud shuffling just-up-to-the-line-of-violence, right in the very faces of their own representatives of Congress, requiring police protection in order to escort those elected representatives safely from the meetings — that part is new. That part is not normal.
It’s been normal in the battle for gay rights for decades now…you’re only just now noticing it, because they’ve moved beyond us. But you have to understand this: you’ve always been the target too. A free, just, and proud America has always been their target. The America of liberty and justice for all has always been their target. Because in that America, they’re then just a bunch of ignorant runts, resentful that the universe doesn’t revolve around them, resentful of everything fine and noble human beings can be, they they never will because it’s too much work.
You haven’t seen the hate like your gay neighbors have seen it. Now you are. Surprised? Shocked? Just wait until you realize, really realize, that there is no bottom there.
One thing to keep in mind is that race, and racism, have rarely ever acted alone. One of the best points that Phillip Dray makes in his classic history of lynching is that epidemics of lynching often coincided, not just with an expansion of black rights, but with increased labor mobility among white women. So fear of white women, and their independence, as well as fear of sexual competition, all worked in concert. It wasn’t simply "I hate niggers" — it never is. It was "I don’t much like black people, and prices are going up, and I have to let my wife work, so I can survive, and I’m scared she won’t stay with me if she’s not dependent on me and I’d die if she left me for a black guy." Or some such.
Ditto for the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn’t just racism — it was class also. In the South you had this black middle class that always had to be deferential to the most poorest white person in the world. The prospect of losing that deference, of already being lower than the white aristocracy and now also being lower than a class of blacks too, wreaked havoc.
…
We’ve got governors yelling about secession, and major politicians peddling stories of imminent threats to your family and your children by the very government they are supposedly a part of, and every day the town hall footage just seems to look more and more like a modernized version of the mob attacks against citizens and legislators during old anti-desegregation rallies, and we don’t need to say "sooner or later someone will be shot" because it has already happened, and multiple times, and in truth it never really left us, these last fifty years.
It wasn’t about desegregation. It wasn’t about feminism. It wasn’t about gay rights. Those were just the flashpoints…the excuses. It wasn’t about any of those things. Not ever. Think about the other major event of the last half of the 20th century…the cold war. Think about the Iron Curtain. Think about the Berlin Wall. Think about all those people who were shot, trying to get over it to freedom. Think about what was going through the minds of the people who gave the order to shoot and kill those wall climbers. What this has always been about: The Gutter…resentful, hating everyone who ever managed to rise above them, fearful of being left alone in the gutter, afraid of the day when the walls all fall down and everyone who can leaves them behind and all they’ll have is each other to look at, and to blame.
TRANSCRIPT: Never underestimate the ability of a tiny fringe group of losers to ruin everything. For the past couple of weeks we’ve been laughing heartily at the wacky antics of the "birthers", the far-right goofballs who claim Obama wasn’t really born in Hawaii and therefore the job goes to the runner-up, Miss California Carrie Prejean.
And you know there is nothing you can do to convince these people, you can hand them in person the original birth certificate with the placenta, and have a video of Obama emerging from the womb with Don Ho singing in the background, and they still would not believe it.
"Hey birthers, wanna hear my theory? My theory was that Obama was born in America and you were born with the umbilical cord around your neck. I don’t know what his mother was doing when she was pregnant, but I’m pretty sure your mom was drinking."
Oh, I kid the birthers, there’s one thing that makes me think they could be right. We’re Americans, of course we’re gonna hire an illegal alien to clean-up.
I’m joking, of course. And laughing it off has also been the reaction from Democratic leaders so far. Proving that Democrats never learn. But if you don’t immediately kill errant bulls**t, no matter how ridiculous it can’t grow and thrive like crabgrass or Cirque du Soleil. This birther stuff might be a deluded right-wing obsession, but so was Whitewater and look where that ended up: "What are they gonna do, keep expanding the case until they impeach the President over a blowjob?"
Yes.
I’m telling you that in America there is no idea so patently absurd that it can’t catch on. Have you ever met a Mormon?
Or, more recently, we had the Swift Boat allegations against John Kerry, making him, a genuine war hero, a coward in a race against the guy who never left Texas. It was so stupid Kerry refused to even discuss it and we all know how well that worked out.
Well, you may ask, how something as inane as Whitewater or Swift Boats or the birther-thing gains traction? Well I’ll tell you how, the same way that the story of Elton John almost dying from ingesting too much of Rod Stewart’s sperm gained traction in my high school, dummies talking to other dummies.
It’s just easier now because of the internet. And because our mainstream media does such a lousy job of talking truth to stupid.
Lou Dobbs said recently, "People are asking a lot of questions about the birth certificate." Yes, the same people who want to know where the Sun goes at night and where to put the stamp on their e-mail. And Lou, you’re their new king.
Which is why it is so important that we, the few, the proud, the reality based, attack this stuff before it has a chance to fester and spread. This is not a case of Democrats versus Republicans. It’s sentient beings versus the lizard people.
And it is to the lizard people that I offer this deal, I will show you President Obama’s birth certificate when you show me Sarah Palin’s high school diploma.
…because our mainstream media does such a lousy job of talking truth to stupid. Yes. Because they’re not allowed to by their corporate masters. See what happened to Keith Olbermann.
I live in suburban Orange County, California, which is great place for my family and the weather can’t be beat. I grew up near Edinburgh, Scotland and moved to the US in the late ’80s, when the UK was just a mess. Orange County is one of the most conservative, wealthier counties in the US. Even so, I had an unbelievable experience the other day that brought home the recession in a way that still upsets me.
While on a lunch break I pulled into a gas station in Irvine to gas up. While I was standing around waiting for my gas guzzler to fill up I heard a small boy crying. Over in the far corner of the parking lot was a fairly nice sedan, late ’90s model, perhaps a Lexus. It was parked next to the air-and-water pump. I could not see anyone but I could still hear a child crying from somewhere near the car. Then I heard something like "No, Daddy, that hurts." Well, this got my attention real quick, so I wandered around the back of my car to get a better look.
Two small good looking young boys, ages roughly 3 and 7 were being bathed in the free water pump by their parents. The young kid was crying as the water was cold and the dad was attempting to rinse the shampoo from his son’s hair The mom was trying to comfort the young one. When I looked at the car again I noticed it was absolutely packed with clothes, etc. It hit me right away that this family was homeless.
I could just see the sadness and desperation on the mom’s face. I felt a chill inside. I walked up to the dad and offered him all the cash I had – about $30. The look in his eyes was something I will always remember: grateful, yet ashamed. A sad, sad situation. And for this to happen in Orange County is just remarkable.
It was seeing this back during the big Reagan recession that cured me of my libertarian delusion. For the same reason a nation of free people still needs a rule of law, an economy needs regulation to prevent corruption and maintain a healthy state of competition in the marketplace. So when you hear some dimwit libertarian or Randite ask "Who are you to tell other people what to do with their property?", the answer should be, loud and clear "I’m one of the people who gets sick whenever someone in the boardroom of a hedge fund I’ve never even heard of sneezes, that’s who."
I could just see the sadness and desperation on the mom’s face.
That face is what you get when you take the brakes off. Every. Time.
Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committe held the first-ever hearing on the Uniting American Families Act, which would equalize the status of foreign-born same-sex partners of American citizens. Heterosexual Americans can earn citizenship for their foreign partners by marrying them. Gays, obviously, cannot do that, effectively making a gay American and his or her foreign spouse legal strangers.
Testifying was Shirley Tan, a Fillipino woman who has been with her American partner for 23 years. Together, they are raising twelve-year-old twin boys…
…one of Tan’s children started crying within seconds of the start of her testimony. At the sight of this, Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy stopped the hearing and asked Tan if her son might want to sit in another room, where presumably a Senate staffer would console him for the duration of what was clearly an emotionally fraught experience. For most people, the sight of a 12-year-old boy in tears at the prospect of his mother being deported halfway around the world would invoke some sympathy. Unmoved, however, was Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions, ranking minority member of the Committee and the only Republican to bother to attend the hearing. At the sight of the weeping boy, according to a Senate staffer who was at the hearing, Sessions leaned towards one of his aides and sighed, "Enough with the histrionics."
Take Note:
Sessions opposes the bill, stating that it would amount to a federal recognition of same-sex marriage.
I keep drumming on this but it’s a simple fact: Everything we have ever asked for in this fight, from hospital visitation to the repeal of the sodomy laws amounts to recognition of same-sex marriage if you listen to our enemies. This has always been their trump card in Every Fucking battle over any and everything: turn it into a fight over same sex marriage.
So it makes no sense to say that we are wasting energy fighting over same-sex marriage when we could be putting our resources into fighting for anti-discrimination and hate crime laws. Everything is a fight over same-sex marriage. Which is to say, everything is a fight over the legitimacy of our emotional lives. The pieces make up a whole at the center of which is a simple question: do gay people experience life the same way heterosexuals do, or do we, as Orson Scott Card would say, merely play house in hollow mimicry of genuine emotions that heterosexuals feel?
Look at Sessions’ gut level knee jerk response to that kid’s tears again. Histronics. He doesn’t believe they are real. They can’t possibly be. Because that family is only playing house. It isn’t a real family. They don’t have real feelings. It’s just an act they have convinced themselves of. Even the kids. This is the enemy your gay and lesbian neighbors have been facing for decades now.
At any rate, while looking at Wikipedia for a Calhoun image, I saw this list of places named after John Calhoun. It’s a long list! And while I suppose I would hesitate to specifically place the blame for any current problems in American society on the fact that there are all these towns and counties and streets named after the guy, it is always striking for a historically informed northerner to see how thoroughly un-disavowed the legacy of white supremacy is in southern official culture. Get on 395 in DC and take the bridge across the Potomac, exiting onto Route 1, and you’ll find yourself on Jefferson Davis Highway. Yes. A highway named after the political leader of a rebellion against the duly constituted government of the United States of America, founded on the principle that democracy was less important than the right of white people to own black people. Right there on signs and everything.
Travel in the South much? As Atrios said, Nobody could have predicted that the election of an African-American president would cause Southern states to start declaring their independence.
Go ahead and laugh as you whistle past the civil war graveyard. Calhoun was instrumental in getting the southern states of his time to pass similar nullification resolutions. It was the first rumbling of the ocean of bloodshed to come. That war killed more Americans then all our other wars combined. And far too many leaders in the South today think they’re still living in the Confederate States of America, and that it would be a glorious thing to rise again. Better millions of Americans die, better The United States of America is buried under a mountain of wreckage, then all Americans can live together peaceably, as equals, with liberty and justice for all.
If it happens here again, it will be more Sarajevo then Gettysburg.
There Is No Such Thing As A Filibuster Proof Democratic Majority
Atrios on Arlen Specter switching parties:
I hope this works out better than I expect, but 60 nominal Ds doesn’t equal 60 votes.
Right. And Specter isn’t the only D who, as Harry Reid said of Specter, is "with us except when we need him". Whenever I hear republicans fear mongering about a democratic super majority it always puts me in mind of what Will Rogers said: "I am not a member of any organized party – I am a Democrat". There could be just one republican left on Capital Hill, just one lonely republican in the House of Representatives, and there would be enough democrats willing to vote with him, that he could get his way on just about anything.
Democrats don’t like playing hardball. Republicans think bipartisanship is when democrats give them what they want. Until we get more democrats willing to fight for democratic principles (you know…that "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity" stuff…), it won’t matter how many democrats there are in congress, the republicans will still control the agenda.
Divide the nation, Nixon’s adviser Pat Buchanan told him, and we’ll have the bigger half. Several decades of culture war later, the right has simply led a fairly sizable slice of America into a kind of mental prison more lock tight then anything old Joe Stalin, Mao or Goebbels could have wished for in their wildest dreams. Here’s one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers explaining something I’ve seen with my own eyes in my own family, and among folks who once upon a time were friends of mine…
I celebrated Easter yesterday with my ultra conservative family. I love my family but they have gone so far to the right over the past 8 years that it is difficult to have any sort of discussion with them. I think they are typical of conservatives born in the baby boom. They are scarred by the culture wars and the hatred they have for the left is so strong that it becomes disturbing.
That hatred, let it be said, didn’t start with Reagan. It started with Nixon. These are the folks of my own generation and earlier, who cheered on the hard hats as they bashed the hippies protesting racism, the Vietnam war, and fought for women’s rights and sexual liberty. You need to remember about this crowd that they thought that the twin beds in Lucy and Ricky’s television apartment and the fact that even when Lucy was clearly "with child" nobody was allowed to utter the word "pregnant" on TV was as perfectly appropriate for TV as Fred Flintstone selling cigarettes. Separate But Equal was working just fine until some communist inspired uppity blacks and a bunch of New York Jews started agitating everyone. A woman’s place was in the house cooking dinner for her husband not in the workplace unless she was too ugly to find a man and maybe those women could be secretaries or nurses or waitresses or something. And the more horrifying symbol of social decay, the biggest threat to the sanctity of American family life wasn’t homosexuality or even the Communist Menace, it was males wearing their hair so long it went below the collar.
These people weren’t scarred by the culture wars. They were scarred by the shock, shock of seeing that there were other people in the world who didn’t buy into their racist, sexist, war mongering moral values. Let’s see how well they’ve matured over the years shall we…?
So with this in mind I compiled a few themes from the days discussions that you might find interesting (or horrifying). None of this is ground breaking but it is interesting to see these generalizations about the current conservative movement be personified in ones family.
1. Total insulation from MSM.
Everyone refuses to read the New York Times or Washington Post. Sunday morning while getting ready for Church I put on "Meet the Press" and my father looked on with disgust and changed the channel to Fox News. At dinner I brought up an article in The Economist that was critical of Barack Obama and my uncle said that it was a socialist rag.
2. Distrust of centrists When discussing the future of the Republican party I suggested that we needed to create a bigger tent and avoid social issues that alienated us from younger voters. My GRANDMOTHER responded that we don’t need the back benchers like Christopher Buckley dictating our principles. I think that line was straight from the Mark Levin show.
3. Neoconservative aspirations The most interesting part of the day, was that so much of the discussion focused on the Somali Pirate issue. It was the story of the day, but I didn’t think their was that much to talk about. Surely, not as interesting as talking about Iran, Obama’s budget, the economy etc. However we spent most of the day discussing Obama’s lackluster response to the issue and the weakness he displayed in not acting quicker. My father was incensed that the media kept referring to this as a crime rather then an act of terrorism. His suggestion was to engage in a land war in Somalia…
This tracks pretty well with my own personal experiences, particularly among a few ersatz friends of the Republican Persuasion who kept right on voting for the Shrub even when his party waged one of the most blistering anti-gay election campaigns in American history. They get their news from FOX. As terrified of them as the mainstream news media is, the hard core Still avoids it like it was radioactive, and read only their own tribal publications.
Let me tell you a wee story about that. After I’d been to Memphis to show my support for an Ex-Gay Survivor’s conference, I noticed that Time Magazine did a story that week on gay teens that touched on how this new generation of gay teens is often pressured by their families into ex-gay camps. So I figure I’ll pick up a copy on the drive back home. My drive took me east on I-40 to I-81 and up the backbone of Virginia. Starting around just north of Galax I began to check the drugstores and WalMarts for copies. What I found was that nowhere…and I mean nowhere I stopped, and I must have stopped at dozens of places on the way home…had Any mainstream news magazines for sale on their racks anywhere between Hillsville and Winchester Virginia. Not just no Time, but no Newsweeks, no U.S. News…nada…nothing. Maybe there were some to be found somewhere in that stretch of countryside…but I never found any near the highway until I got to Winchester and pulled into a shopping mall. And the young lady behind the counter gave me a dirty look when she saw what I was buying.
They don’t want to even hear it now. And they don’t have to. They can get their news exclusively from tribal sources. But those sources are anything but grass roots. They imagine they are part of a disenfranchised grass roots majority that was…somehow…denied power that is rightfully theirs by a variety of secret liberal-communist-socialist-homosexual cabals. In fact, they are almost completely owned by right wing billionaires and corporate America.
Case in point…this sad, odd, pathetic tea protest. I’m going to steal this post from Digby (who you should read more often if you don’t already) because it pretty well sums it all up…
Following up on Krugman’s column today and the shrieking and rending of garments by the rightwing, I think it’s it’s probably important to make very clear why the tea-bagger parties are not a grassroots uprising.
The right seems to want us to believe that Fox News is promoting this non-stop as a genuine news event rather than a sponsor — despite the fact that it is an event which hasn’t happened yet. They are, by definition, promoting it.
Local news organizations, which are reporting on the planning for this event either do not realize that they are being spun by a front group pretending to be a grassroots organizing campaign or they don’t care. That front group is called Freedom Works, which presents itself as the conservative answer to Move On.
The MoveOn.org domain name was registered on September 18, 1998 by computer entrepreneurs Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, the married cofounders of Berkeley Systems, an entertainment software company known for the flying toaster screen saver and the online game show "You Don’t Know Jack." After selling the company in 1997, Blades and Boyd became concerned about the level of "partisan warfare in Washington" following revelations of President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. The MoveOn website was launched initially to oppose the Republican-led effort to impeach Clinton. Initially called "Censure and Move On," it invited visitors to add their names to an online petition stating that "Congress must Immediately Censure President Clinton and Move On to pressing issues facing the country."
At the time of MoveOn’s public launch on September 24, it appeared likely that its petition would be dwarfed by the effort to oust Clinton. A reporter who interviewed Blades on the day after the launch wrote, "A quick search on Yahoo turns up no sites for ‘censure Clinton’ but 20 sites for ‘impeach Clinton,’" adding that Scott Lauf’s impeachclinton.org website had already delivered 60,000 petitions to Congress. Salon.com reported that Arianna Huffington, then a right-wing commentator, had collected 13,303 names on her website, resignation.com, which called on Clinton to resign.
Within a week, however, support for MoveOn had grown. Blades calls herself an "accidental activist. … We put together a one-sentence petition. … We sent it to under a hundred of our friends and family, and within a week we had a hundred thousand people sign the petition. At that point, we thought it was going to be a flash campaign, that we would help everyone connect with leadership in all the ways we could figure out, and then get back to our regular lives. A half a million people ultimately signed and we somehow never got back to our regular lives." MoveOn also recruited 2,000 volunteers to deliver the petitions in person to members of the House of Representatives in 219 districts across America, and directed 30,000 phone calls to district offices.
Here’s how it does business:
MoveOn uses e-mail as its main conduit for communicating with members, sending action alerts at least once a week.
The MoveOn.org web site also uses multi-media, including videos, audio downloads, and images. In addition to communicating via the Internet, MoveOn advertises using traditional print and broadcast media, as well as billboards, bus signs, and bumper stickers, digital versions of which are downloadable from its web site. It also contains an area called the "Action Forum", which functions much like a traditional electronic discussion group. The Action Forums act as a grassroots organization allowing members to propose priorities and strategies.
Through this grassroots methodology, MoveOn collaborates with groups like Meetup.com in organizing street demonstrations, bake sales, house parties, and other opportunities for people to meet personally and act collectively in their own communities.
Some of its core principles are that it is not dependent on foundation money and that it has the ability to use ‘hard money’ – as opposed to grants and tax-deductible contributions – which enables them to be partisan, contribute to political campaigns, and exercise clout in the political process.
Stealing a page from MoveOn.org‘s successful organizing playbook, the leaders of FreedomWorks – a complete merger of the conservative think-tanks Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) and Empower America – hope to conduct massive get out the vote and political education campaigns in the swing states on behalf of President George W. Bush.
The two groups decided to merge because there was "an overlap in issues between the two organization," Shawn Small, the Director of Policy at Empower America, told me in a telephone interview. It was an opportunity to bring together Empower America, which Small characterized as a "grasstops" organization driven by such inside the beltway "superstars" as William Bennett, Vin Weber and Jean Kirkpatrick and CSE’s "grassroots" following.
Will FreedomWorks be successful? Maybe, maybe not, but it is sure to be controversial with longtime Republican Party operative Matt Kibbe at the helm.
If the agenda of FreedomWorks sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The organization’s new website proclaims that it "will expand and broaden the national fight for lower taxes, less government, and more economic freedom."
The leaders of FreedomWorks have all been around the Beltway a number of times. Former House Majority Leader, Texas Republican congressman Dick Armey, C. Boyden Gray, onetime legal counsel to Bush’s father and chairman of the Committee for Justice, an organization about to launch a campaign on behalf of Bush’s right wing judicial appointees, and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary and failed vice-presidential candidate, Jack Kemp, will serve as the Co-Chairmen of the organization.
And here’s how it operates:
FreedomWorks claims a membership of over 360,000 and a multi-tentacled legal structure that includes a 501 c(3), a 501 c(4), a 527, a federal PAC, and various state PACs. John Stauber, co-author of Banana Republicans: How The Right Wing is Turning America into a One-Party State, recently pointed out that that according to internal documents leaked to the Washington Post in January 2000, the bulk of Citizens for a Sound Economy‘s revenues ($15.5 million in 1998) came not from its members, but from contributions of $250,000 and up from large corporations, including Allied Signal, Archer Daniels Midland, DaimlerChrysler, Emerson Electric Company, Enron, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Philip Morris and U.S. West (now Qwest).
And like their progenitors they get millions from the conservative foundations.
Can we all see the difference between Freedom Works and Move On? I knew that you could.
This is what a grass roots movement looks like in conservative America. It’s fake. Just like all the rhetoric about individual freedom, Jesus and family values. Just as The Washington Times could not survive without the infusions of large piles of cash from messianic crackpot Sun Myung Moon, nearly every so-called conservative grass-roots organization could not exist without the largess of corporate America and the stable of right wing billionaires who have been funding the modern conservative movement since the culture wars began in the 60s. Scaife. Ahmanson. Coors. Bradley. Olin. Koch. These people, and the rest of what Eisenhower warned as The Military Industrial Complex, are the crack epidemic poisoning the veins of our country. Without them Americans might actually be getting along with one another reasonably well.
And families like those of Sullivan’s reader might not be living in a 21st century cave, complete with nice TVs and radios that stroke their bar stool conceits, making goddamned sure they see of the world outside only what the ayatollahs of the hard right want them to see, and think Exactly what they want them to think. They are tools, useful idiots, disposable human lives in the war a small but very powerful group of billionaires and corporate interests have been waging for decades now on the American Dream.
What you need to understand: many of them made that of themselves willingly. Joyfully even. Better to live in a cave, then to know that the heathens aren’t monsters after all, but other human beings, happy and content with their own lives just as they are. Anything to not have to know that.
I wrote previously that the fight for gay equality isn’t over simply when common, decent heterosexuals stop seeing their gay neighbors through the prism of every anti-gay stereotype the hatemongers have been pushing for generations, and start seeing us for the human beings we really are. That’s an important step, but not the final one. The last step comes when they finally start seeing the hatemongers for…well…the hatemongers they are.
The saving grace of it is that it gets easier the closer gay folk get to the equality prize. The masks of civility and decency just start dropping like crazy and for a moment, the homophobes seem to have suddenly become completely unhinged. But your gay and lesbian neighbors know that they have always been unhinged. They’ve just never talked that way in front of the rest of the nation before. Case in point, Peter LaBarbera. Or as he’s affectionately known over at Pam’s House Blend…The Peter.
LaBarbera’s signature act is to go "undercover" into the gay S&M scene and report back on all the unsavory things going on in the backrooms, sex parties and dungeons. Never mind that S&M isn’t a particularly gay phenomina. Never mind that you could wander through the heterosexual side of any adult bookstore anywhere in this country and find grown heterosexual adults engaging in the very same acts. LaBarbera seeks out the most exotic, the most extreme, the most unsavory things he can find in the gay community, and then presents it to his flock as what it is to be homosexual. This is how hatemongers have operated since the dawn of human history. Via Pam’s House Blend, here’s a typical example of how LaBarbera preferrs to operate…
Man, oh man…after he wrote me a letter to chastise me for making fun of his excursions to leather clubs to do undercover work for Jeezus, Illinois Family Institute’s Peter LaBarbera just lets it all hang out in an article on Salon (registration required) by Michelle Goldberg, "Sinners in the hands of an angry GOP." It’s an inside look at the goings-on at the War on Christians and the Values Voters conference.
Because Petey’s efforts to demonize the entire gay community are failing miserably (the Gay Games are going on in Chicago with Walgreen’s sponsorship; his marriage amendment initiative can’t get the signatures it needs) he must now escalate the homo-hate wars with a little spice — by trolling on gay boards for research on how to scare youth away from the gay agenda.
Perhaps worrying that anti-gay rhetoric hasn’t been sufficiently inflammatory lately, some speakers urged listeners to start using more scatological and stigmatizing language. Peter LaBarbera, who heads the Illinois Family Institute and is known for his obsession with gay men’s most outré sexual practices, told the audience, "My greatest frustration has been our side’s inability to make homosexual behavior an issue in the public’s mind." In order to inspire the kind of revulsion he wants to see more of, he read from a posting on a gay message board: "Hey guys, I know this is kind of gross and all, but I was wondering if I’m the only one. I’m usually the bottom in my relationship with my boyfriend. After having been the receptive partner in anal sex it’s only a few hours before I start to experience diarrhea … it really stinks, because I really like sex, duh, but it takes the fun out of it when I know I’ll be tied to the bathroom for the next day."
"I don’t think so-called GLBT teens are told anything like this" by their school counselors, LaBarbera said. "We need to find ways to bring shame back to those who are practicing and advocating homosexual behavior."
Take note of two things: firstly, that this is being discussed openly as a matter of tactics. It’s not about what the facts are, it’s about what creates the maximum effect. Secondly, this is the kook pews talking among themselves. This is being discussed at the War on Christians and the Values Voters Conference. In the mainstream news, they would never say they are choosing what to say about homosexuality mostly for effect. Yet note also, the rote bemoaning of their inability to get the message out. Time and again you hear them saying among themselves, that if they could only get their message out Teh Gays wouldn’t be winning the culture war. Note that, and note along with it that they are nonetheless careful to moderate their rhetoric in public.
At least, up until now. Triumphant after last November, once again they see themselves loosing ground to an enemy they can’t seem to get an edge up on no matter how much they do, no matter how many political victories they score. When all you have are lies to win the war with, then the war is lost. But you go into battle with what you have. And as I said, the saving grace of all this is that the more they loose, the more vehement they become. And then people start to notice something.
People like Glenn Sacks. Sacks, a columnist whose focus is on men’s and fathers’ issues, specifically on the father’s rights movement, but also on men’s rights in general, took issue recently with Christian Newswire’s giving LaBarbera a forum to dump his poison into the political dialogue…
Mercifully, most opponents of gay marriage are not anti-gay bigots like LaBarbera. I have no problem with gay marriage and gay rights, but however one feels about gay marriage, it has nothing to do with the decline of the American family. The real threat to American families is not gay marriage but instead divorce and a family law system which separates millions of children from the fathers they love and need.
Sacks provided his readers with a handy link they could use to tell Christian Newswire what they thought of LaBarbera’s bigotry. Naturally, LaBarbera couldn’t take that laying down. As Sacks reported in a follow up post, LaBarbera responded in his own characteristically measured and thoughtful way…
Are you a homosexual, Glenn?
More of that exchange Here. Here’s where it get’s interesting. LaBarbera sent an alarm out to dozens of religious right groups, calling Sack’s post arrogant and harmful to the movement. You get the sense from Sacks’ follow-up post that he expected better from the movement’s leaders then he got. But almost any gay American citizen could have told him what to expect…
In a letter to me cc’d to dozens of Christian leaders, LaBarbera called my post "arrogant and harmful" and sent a follow-up letter asking "Are you a homosexual, Glenn?" A lively debate ensued, in which many Christian leaders wrote to me.
What I expected was that many of them would say something along the lines of "We agree that Peter LaBarbera’s views are extreme and we don’t support them, but we do believe that gay marriage is harmful." While I don’t believe that gay marriage is harmful, I do not now nor have I ever believed that all who oppose gay marriage are anti-gay.
I taught in Christian high-schools for several years and the religious leaders always told me that the Christian teaching on gays is to "Love the sinner, hate the sin." If Christians want to have credibility on opposing gay marriage, they must also oppose anti-gay bigotry, and I expected that many of them would.
Instead, I’ve been disappointed and at times floored by the unreserved support some have shown LaBarbera, including many letters with the subject line "I Stand with Peter."
Many of these are major figures. For example, Janet M. LaRue, Chief Counsel for Concerned for America, wrote:
"Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness; Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!"…I know Pete LaBarbera. Pete LaBarbera is a friend of mine.
Christian radio host/author Janet Folger Porter wrote:
Peter LaBarbera is the best example of what Christians should be doing…Peter’s comments have been nothing but honest, loving, and courageous.
Matt Barber of Liberty Counsel and Scott Lively, president of Defend the Family, signed on to the "I Stand with Peter" letter. Lively, apparently referring to me, wrote:
Who is this uncircumcised Philistine who challenges the army of the Living God?
Lively adds
You obviously don’t have a clue about the role of the homosexual movement in the disintegration of the natural family model in America. Without the "gays’" largely hidden but relentless anti-family social-engineering campaign since the 1940s, there wouldn’t be a fathers’ rights crisis in our land.
Hetersoexual divorce and out-of-wedlock births are the fault of gays? Lively is right–I certainly missed that one.
Townhall columnist Robert Knight of Coral Ridge Ministries writes:
Peter LaBarbera is a courageous, talented and honest advocate for the truth who will not back down in the face of vicious attacks or smear campaigns. He has said nothing that is not backed by voluminous evidence…
He has exposed the relentless and reckless promotion of behavior that is documentably dangerous and soul-destroying. That’s the face of real compassion, not the ersatz concern of people who pat homosexuals on the head, watch them go off a cliff into disease, drugs, alcohol, and suicide, and then blame others for not going along with the fictions that homosexuality is harmless and inevitable.
Ingrid Schlueter of the VCY America Radio Network writes:
Peter, unlike most evangelicals today, has the testosterone to challenge those who pervert Scripture, pervert sexuality, and insist that everyone accept it as normal. He has my absolute support…
Phil Burress, Chairman of Equal Rights not Special Rights, writes:
Peter LaBarbera is my friend and I want to be named alongside him the next time you attack him for telling the truth.
It goes on and on…with Sacks just staring dumbfounded…
Peter Sprigg, Senior Director of Culture Studies of the Family Research Council, did give an answer to my question "If Peter LaBarbera’s statement isn’t bigoted, what is?", writing:
Fred Phelps, who says "God hates f-gs," is bigoted. Peter LaBarbera is not.
Both Phelps and LaBarbera are bigoted, but I would agree with Sprigg that Phelps is far worse.
Alan Chambers, president of Exodus International and author of Leaving Homosexuality, defended LaBarbera, writing:
Peter may not always say the right thing, but who one of us does? As Christians I think we ought to go to our brother or sister when we think they have missed the mark before we do a blog post on it…
I’m fully aware that people sometimes don’t always express themselves the way they would like to, and I’ve certainly said things on TV and the radio that I could have phrased better. But Peter’s views that I criticized are ones that he has written on many occasions–it’s fair to characterize them as his views and criticize them.
Chambers also states that he is "unalterably convinced that Peter indeed loves sinners and cares about their eternities more than the policies he fights for." All I can say is that if this is true, Peter is uncharacteristically shy about letting the public know about it.
That Chambers would be quick to come to LaBarbera’s defense is interesting for the controversy that’s been actively reported on over at Box Turtle Bulletin, concerning Exodus participation in a Ugandian conference on homosexuality. Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively was a speaker and once again ginned up anti-gay passions in a land torn by genocide, by claiming that genocide is the work of homosexuals, while Exodus board member Don Schmierer sat and smiled. Jim Burroway and Timothy Kincaid have been asking Exodus to repudiate board member Don Schmierer’s participation in the conference, which included calls for wholesale witchhunting and imprisoning of gay people in Uganda. To date, other then a squalid bit of both-sides-of-the-mouth boilerplate PR, Exodus has remained silent. Gay people are killed time and again in the venomous hostility created by hatemongers like LaBarbera and Lively, and Exodus, which laughably claims to be a non-political faith group that only seeks to heal unwanted "same sex attractions" acknowledges with President Alan Chamber’s defense of LaBarbera, that the blood of all those innocents is on its hands too. As Christians Alan, you ought to consider whether your words bring peace to the world, or inflame passions. But then, your Christianity is as thin as your ersatz love for those gay poeple who had more courage and stronger inner resources of character then you could ever muster in your own life, isn’t it Alan?
Sacks ends the exchange with this…
In conclusion, I’m surprised and rather disappointed. Is Peter LaBarbera really representative of modern Christian thought? I don’t believe that–I believe Christians are much better than that. I have a very hard time imagining the many hard-working, devoted religious faculties I once worked with holding LaBarbera’s views. But in general this recent exchange doesn’t do much to support my optimism.
LaBarbera isn’t representative of modern Christian thought. He’s merely and utterly representative of a certain kind of American culture warrior…the kook pews…the ones who are still arguing that giving women and non-property owners the vote is what ruined America. And no doubt the darkies too. There is a good deal more to Christianity then this little corner of the human gutter. You thought they were better then this. A lot of people do. Welcome to the other side of the public face…the side that has been spitting in the faces of your gay and lesbian neighbors for decades now.
Yes…it’s pretty awful. But you needed to see this. Just remember what Nietzsche said about staring into an abyss. You have to keep reminding yourself that there is more to humanity, let alone to Christianity, then this.
Natale Davis over at All Facts points me to a post over at the Christian Science Monitor "Patchwork Nation" blog about recent events on the same-sex marriage front. Patchwork Nation is an interesting project…
About the Patchwork Nation project
The United States is a vast, diverse place – more than 300 million people spread over 3.5 million square miles. Yet our understanding of its complexities is limited. We think of demographic slices or broad regions, or we fall back on the overused, oversimplified ideas of red and blue America.
Patchwork Nation, funded by the Knight Foundation, a nonprofit philanthropic organization based in Miami, is designed to help us get past those views and understand how different communities and cultures within the US experience different realities – and shape the whole.
So the blog post in question grabs snapshots of opinions from each of their representative communities thusly…
In Los Alamos, N.M., our wealthy and educated “Monied ’Burb,” there doesn’t seem to be much of a gay marriage “issue.”
“Our legislature introduced a bill allowing gay marriage. It died in committee,” says Bill Enloe, chairman and CEO of Los Alamos National Bank, in an e-mail. But he also writes, “The majority of individuals in the state are in favor of allowing gay marriage. It might pass next year.”
Kevin Holsapple, executive director of the Los Alamos Chamber of Commerce, e-mailed that he had “never perceived it to be an issue” in the city.
In Lincoln City, Ore., our small-town “Service Worker Center,” some in the community are focused on the topic, according to Patchwork Nation blogger Kip Ward, who runs a local hotel. However, “For most of us, we have bigger fish to fry,” he says in an e-mail. “We just don’t bother with it one way or the other.”
In Ann Arbor, Mich., our liberal “Campus and Careers” community, one correspondent succinctly e-mailed, “Gay marriage should be a nonissue.”
And in Nixa, Mo., our socially conservative “Evangelical Epicenter,” local retiree Betty Ann Rogers wrote that she hadn’t really heard about the issue or read about it in the newspaper.
…but what gets my attention is a comment left by a reader from Massachusetts:
Here in Massachusetts, so little is different that you’d not know that we were the first state to legalize gay marriage, if you didn’t make an effort to ‘turn the rocks over’ or ‘kick the logs’ a bit. Those gay and lesbian couples who wanted to marry have done so…and settled down into quiet, integrated parts of the communities in which they live. They pay taxes, support churches, do community service work, and just generally help their areas be better places. You’d never know that there had been a ‘country-shaking’, ‘ground-breaking’ event here by the quietness of it all. My marriage fell apart not because some of my gay and lesbian friends married their partners, but because of my own failings (or those of my ex). I think that as things march forward, people will come to see that that their own relationships are not, in any way, controlled or affected by those around them, gay or straight, and that tolerance and quiet, friendly support for happy couples is much, much better for our society overall than is angry divisiveness.
Emphasis mine. This is why Every Single Battle in this fight has been to the death. Because once people see they’ve been lied to about the Homosexual Menace, the whole house of cards falls apart. It isn’t society sliding into sexual anarchy the homophobes have been afraid of. It’s the see-it-with-your-own-two-eyes realization that bringing same sex couples into the fold actually strengthens communities that they never, at any cost, wanted people to behold.
For generations they have put knives into our hearts so they could feel righteous. For generations they have taken what should be one of this life’s most perfect joys…falling in love, and being loved in return…and turned it into a nightmare for this one small portion of the human family. They did it so they wouldn’t have to look at the barren wasteland they’d made of their own stone cold hearts. They did it so they could have scapegoats for every cheapshit character flaw of their own. They turned their gay neighbors into monsters, so they wouldn’t have to confront the monsters staring back at them in the bathroom mirror. Andrew Sullivan and Damon Linker have been staring in wonder at the depth of the fear in Rod Dreher’s writing on the subject of same-sex marriage. But they have it all wrong. It isn’t change Dreher is afraid of. It isn’t the fear that civilization may slide into sexual anarchy that grips him. It’s being held responsible for all those thousands upon thousands of broken hearts and murdered hopes and dreams. Why did they do it? Why? Why was it necessary to put a knife into the hearts of so many innocent people? Ultimately, we may never know precisely why. Why do people hate? Why does hate have such power over some of us, and not others? Can we ever really answer that question? But you need to understand what Dreher and his kind fear isn’t the Homosexual Menace, or Sexual Anarchy or The Fall Of Western Civilization, but that common, decent people will stop seeing monsters when they look at their gay neighbors, and instead see who the real monsters were in this unmitigated human tragedy.
There’s the fear. There’s the bottomless fear. Right there.
The process of constitutional referendum in Iowa takes more time then in California, apparently. Before an anti same-sex marriage amendment can be sent to the voters, it has to be approved by the legislature in two consecutive sessions. The republicans in Iowa are complaining that democrats are being obstructionist for not taking up the matter Right Now, instead of next year. The Senate majority leader fired back…
One of my daughters was in the workplace one day, and her particular workplace at that moment in time, there were a whole bunch of conservative, older men. And those guys were talking about gay marriage. They were talking about discussions going on across the country. And my daughter Kate, after listening for about 20 minutes, said to them: ‘You guys don’t understand. You’ve already lost. My generation doesn’t care.’ I think I learned something from my daughter that day, when she said that. And I’ve talked with other people about it and that’s what I see, Senator McKinley. I see a bunch of people that merely want to profess their love for each other, and want state law to recognize that. Is that so wrong? I don’t think that’s so wrong. As a matter of fact, last Friday night, I hugged my wife. You know I’ve been married for 37 years. I hugged my wife. I felt like our love was just a little more meaningful last Friday night because thousands of other Iowa citizens could hug each other and have the state recognize their love for each other. No, Senator McKinley, I will not co-sponsor a leadership bill with you.
I don’t think this is simply a matter of people now reading the tea leaves and deciding it’s safe to support gay Americans in their desire to get married, settle down and make lives together. It’s people, slowly, one-by-one, getting sick and tired at long last of all the venom and hate. People are getting tired of the culture war. They just want to live with their neighbors in peace and good will. Newsweek has an article up titled, The End Of Christian America, which argues thusly…
While we remain a nation decisively shaped by religious faith, our politics and our culture are, in the main, less influenced by movements and arguments of an explicitly Christian character than they were even five years ago. I think this is a good thing—good for our political culture, which, as the American Founders saw, is complex and charged enough without attempting to compel or coerce religious belief or observance. It is good for Christianity, too, in that many Christians are rediscovering the virtues of a separation of church and state that protects what Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island as a haven for religious dissenters, called "the garden of the church" from "the wilderness of the world." As crucial as religion has been and is to the life of the nation, America’s unifying force has never been a specific faith, but a commitment to freedom—not least freedom of conscience. At our best, we single religion out for neither particular help nor particular harm; we have historically treated faith-based arguments as one element among many in the republican sphere of debate and decision. The decline and fall of the modern religious right’s notion of a Christian America creates a calmer political environment and, for many believers, may help open the way for a more theologically serious religious life.
Emphasis mine. You could argue that the religious right’s notion of a Christian America is about as authentic as its notion of Christianity. But this is not the twilight of American Christianity. If anything is coming to an end now, and I am not yet convinced it is, it’s the culture war. Maybe. Hopefully. This is not a Christian nation. It is a nation where Christians are free to worship according to their conscience. But that is only because everyone else is too. President Kennedy in 1960, when it was being asked openly whether or not a Catholic could be president of the United States, said "For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew—or a Quaker—or a Unitarian—or a Baptist… Today I may be the victim – but tomorrow it may be you – until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped."
Divide the nation, and we’ll have the bigger half, said Nixon’s aid Pat Buchannan, signaling the start of the culture war that has gone on to this day. So the southern strategy was put into motion, to divide northern from southern democrats and working people from the democratic party. So the Southern Baptist Convention began tearing their more liberal brothers and sisters from the fabric of the faith. So the Episcopalians began to schism, rather then treat their gay neighbors as fellow human beings. So the more liberal and diverse cities and states of the nation were told they weren’t the true America after all. So gay people were made into demons and scapegoats for every social ill that the culture warriors brought down upon themselves. For the glory of God the fabric of America was torn asunder and the glory that was America, its promise to all the peoples of the world of liberty and justice, was condemned as evil. Only the righteous could have rights. Only the elect could be full citizens. The American Dream isn’t yours heathen…
No, Senator McKinley, I will not co-sponsor a leadership bill with you…
What’s happening is that people are sick of it now. We want to be Americans again.
Back Home From The Happiest Place On Earth To…Earth…I Guess…
First time I left Disney World and walked back into the real one it was to headlines screaming at me that over 170 people had been killed in coordinated terrorist attacks in India. This time:
An ambush that resulted in the shooting deaths of three Pittsburgh policemen was precipitated by an emergency call from the gunman’s mother over a dog urinating in the house.
…later identified as Richard “Pop” Poplawski, 22. A dishonorably charged Marine, he adhered to a number of right-wing conspiracy theories and expressed fears of a “Zionist nation” revoking his right to own guns.
He jumped in a car with oldest daughter Maxine, 16, who tracked her mother through a cellphone global-positioning system.
They homed in on a convenience store 20 miles away in Auburn, north of the Muckleshoot Casino. James confronted his wife, who was with another man. He wanted her home. She said she wasn’t coming back.
He stormed home, consulted relatives and calmed down. Maxine went to bed about 11 p.m. with her four younger siblings. She sent a classmate a text message from her cellphone: “I’m tired of crying. I’m going to bed.”
Within hours, James Harrison, 34, grabbed a rifle and shot each child multiple times. Four were found in bed. One of the girls died in the bathroom after a violent struggle.
Armed with a second rifle, he returned to Auburn on Saturday morning, perhaps in hopes of finding his wife. Perhaps to kill again. Instead, sitting inside his running SUV, he turned the rifle on himself. His body was discovered about 8 a.m. by children playing in the area.
Welcome back to Realityland Bruce…
Oh…and the Iowa Supreme Court Unanimously decided that not letting same sex couples marry was an unconstitutional denial of equal protection. I should be happy about that and I am, but I dread reading the news accounts because inevitably they have to give the gutter a chance to spit on gay people, happy couples, and all their hopes and dreams. But more and more I’m seeing words like these, finally…
There was a time, not that long ago, when it was possible to imagine, however inaccurately, that gay sex was in and of itself a self-destructive pathology, something no happy, healthy person would willingly engage in. That time is past. The evidence of stable, loving relationships between well-adjusted, successful people is all around us. Indeed, this abundant evidence–and not the tides of the sexual revolution, which peaked more than three decades ago and have since receded–is the reason that gay rights, and in particular the question of gay marriage, have moved so quickly in recent years.
That time is past… Yes, for the people willing to let reality speak for itself. I am of a generation of Americans who were taught all kinds of horrible, filthy lies about gay people, and not simply in school, but in church, in the movies, in magazines and newspapers, and on TV. Where we were not dangerous sexual psychopaths we were contemptible faggots. When I was 17, and just beginning to grasp that I was gay myself, I got the message about how people felt about homosexuals from just about every direction I looked…
Mad #145, Sept ‘71, from “Greeting Cards For The
Sexual Revolution” – “To A Gay Liberationist”
At the beginning of James Burke’s PBS series The Day The Universe Changed, he tells a story of some students of philosophy, bragging to the teacher about how ignorant people were to think that the earth was the center of the universe, and that the sun orbited around the earth rather then the other way around. How ignorant, said the students, when all they had to do was just look up and observe the sun rising as the earth turned. Yes, said the teacher, but I wonder how it would have looked to them had the sun actually been orbiting the earth? The point being that it would have looked the same. Sometimes what we see is what our knowledge tells us we’re seeing. And for generation upon generation, people have been taught to see gay people as monsters…sick, perverted, disgusting, pathological monsters.
Which was how we saw ourselves for so very long. That time is past. And years of living openly and proudly are having their effect on anyone open to the evidence. But there’s one more movement to go in this civil rights dance…
A 62-year-old man assaulted in an alleged hate crime in a Vancouver gay bar remains in hospital care.
In the wake of the attack, the local GLBT community has mounted protests against the attack, as well as a string of earlier incidents that may also have been anti-gay hate crimes.
On March 17, Xtra.ca reported that a witness described how the suspect, 35-year-old Shawn Woodward, declared, “He’s a faggot. He deserved it” after allegedly striking Richie Dowrey in the face, knocking him down.
The suspect also reportedly declared, “I’m not a fag. The faggot touched me. He deserved it.”
The alleged bashing took place at a gay bar, The Fountainhead Pub, in Vancouver’s West End.
Said the witness, Dowrey’s friend Lindsay Wincherauk, “[Dowrey] fell like a board to the ground so hard that a hollow thud could be heard throughout the bar.”
Dowrey reportedly suffered severe brain damage.
Said Wincherauk, “There’s a chance if he survives he won’t walk again.”
The sun doesn’t just suddenly rise on a day when we are an equal and respected part of our communities. What happens is gradually, step by step, the chains that hate put on our lives slowly loose their power over us, and we walk free. But we are not free yet. The simple, elegant, beautiful gesture of couples simply holding hands as they walk together, is still enough to get us beaten to death. What happens is that as we walk out of the shadow of hate our heterosexual neighbors begin to see us, finally, as the people we really are. What happens is that hate, greedy, envious, hungry, follows us out of the shadows also, and into the light, where it can be seen by everyone too…
The two men charged in the gay bashing of two University of Cincinnati students near the Main Campus will each reappear before a judge within the next week.
Ethan Kirkwood, 20, of Meadow Creek Drive in Anderson Township, and Matthew Kafagolis, 20, of Ramundo Court in Anderson Township, were arrested on two counts of felonious assault and released on bond. Since the arrest, the charges have been dropped to two counts of misdemeanor assault, according to the Hamilton County Clerk of Courts Web site. The charges were lowered on March 20 and March 19, respectively.
The maximum penalty for a misdemeanor assault charge is less than one year in jail.
…The two men are being charged with allegedly assaulting two men – both are UC students – after the men found out one of the victims was gay, around 4 a.m., Friday, March 6, in the 2500 block of Clifton Avenue.
The gay man was knocked to the ground, kicked and punched after the assailants found out he was gay, according to court records. The other victim was attempting to defend his friend when he was also beaten.
That our neighbors see us for the fellow human beings we are is good, but it is not the end of it. They must also see the hate for what it is too. That will be the end of it, finally. But it is going to destroy more lives before this thing is over.
California, the eighth largest economy in the world, is broke.
"People are going to be hurt starting today," said Hallye Jordan, speaking on behalf of the state Controller. "There’s no money."
Since state legislators failed to meet an end of January deadline on an agreement to make up for California’s $40 billion budget gap, residents won’t be getting their state tax rebates, scholarships to Cal Grant college will go unpaid, vendors invoices will remain uncollected and county social services will cease.
It takes a two-thirds majority in both legislative houses for future increases in all state tax rates or amounts of revenue collected, including income tax rates. It also requires two-thirds vote majority in local elections for local governments wishing to raise special taxes. What that means in practice, is a small minority of anti-government republicans can veto all tax increases, but not any spending bills.
This was deliberate. Knowing that the voters would never accept lower taxes if it meant reduced services, the ideologues decided to sell the voters on the free lunch theory of government…that taxes were high because government was inherently wasteful and corrupt, not because the public wanted it to do things above and beyond the basic services of police, courts, armed forces, like…fight fires…build roads…keep the water supply drinkable…prevent mass outbreaks of food poisoning…provide for the needy…put the unemployed back to work…and so on. Right wing anti-Government operatives like Howard Jarvis and Grover Norquist knew exactly what they were doing. The idea Was to bankrupt government, as a back door way of killing the New Deal. As Grover Norquist put it, to starve government "down to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub."
Well…here we are. In right wing Nirvana…
"Some 46 states face budget shortfalls, forcing them to slash funding for many services," reported CNN. "But California, the largest state in the union by population, faces a deficit that totals more than 35% of its general fund."
Nice work Mr. Norquist, Mr. Jarvis. The whirlwind you ordered is in the mail. And all those people you sold free lunch government to won’t be very happy with you when they’re watching their homes being auctioned off, and their children going hungry, so that your fat cat bankrollers could buy a few more yachts and luxury condos…
Timothy Kincaid over at Box Turtle Bulletin, has the party line vote on the first of the so-called "common ground" bills put forward in Utah. These bills actually do very little to insure equal rights for gay and lesbian citizens…almost the bare minimum you could imagine. The first of these to come to a vote, simply made it possible for financial dependents, other then legally married spouses, parents and children, to sue if their breadwinner suffers wrongful death. Keep in mind that these so-called "common ground" bills were introduced after the passage of Proposition 8, when the Mormon church’s staggering level of involvement became widely known, and the Mormon leadership, while in the glare of the public eye, averred they had no problem with extending gay people many of the rights of marriage…just not marriage itself.
Many of us found that statement interesting, since nothing was stopping them from giving gay Americans in Utah those rights and gay Americans in Utah have damn few if any. The only places as bad to be gay are the deep south
The bill failed along party lines. Republican verses democrat? Oh my, no…
Let me be clear. There is no legitimate reason to exclude those who rely on someone for their livelihood from suing should that livelihood be taken away due to the wrongful actions of another. If a woman is killed directly due to the reckless or wrongful actions of another, why should her partner who stays home and raises the kids not be able to sue?
Chris Buttars, Mormon
Lyle Hillyard, Mormon
Mark Madsen, Mormon
Michael Waddoups, Mormon
The three non-Mormons either voted Yes or were absent.
As Kincaid notes, this fits pretty well with recent polls showing that Utah Mormons are hugely against granting their gay neighbors any rights whatsoever, other then maybe, possibly, the right to breath. So long as they don’t flaunt it.
Expect the Mormon church to claim it has no influence over the state legislature. They’ve shown repeatedly that they can look you right in the eye, smile, and lie through their teeth. Your hopes, your dreams, every smile you ever gave the one you love, and every smile you ever received in love, and placed somewhere deep within your heart: these things are their stepping stones to Godhood. Nothing else matters to them. Nothing. They will walk over your every hope and dream, and grind them into dirt, for that promise of Godhood at the end of the road.
I know…I know… But there are Mormons who don’t hate their gay neighbor… Yes. And they are either silent or they are on the road to excommunication. We, that is America, saw it all during the battle over Proposition 8. There are no Mormons who are not on board for the war on gay Americans…only Mormons who are about to leave, or be shown the door.
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