{"id":2478,"date":"2008-12-18T09:50:10","date_gmt":"2008-12-18T14:50:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/?p=2478"},"modified":"2008-12-18T09:56:15","modified_gmt":"2008-12-18T14:56:15","slug":"when-does-america-become-ours-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/2478","title":{"rendered":"When Does America Become Ours Too?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Isobel White over at Huffington Post pretty well sums it up<\/a> …<\/p>\n

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ike everyone else who cares about LGBT equality, election night brought a mix of joy as it became apparent Obama would win, and pain as we realized Prop. 8 would pass. My wife and I spent the evening in Union Square trying to enjoy a birthday dinner with friends before heading to the official No on 8 party. When word came at around 8:15 that Obama had been elected, cable cars rang their bells and whoops of job sprang up all around the Square. I joined a dozen folks clustering around a local TV station’s van watching a teeny tiny TV broadcasting CNN. I tried to join in the revelry, but all I could access was alienation. At no other time in my life had I felt so discriminated against . I spend my days working on a variety of progressive issues, but in that moment — and for the next week — all that mattered was Prop. 8. My vision narrowed and intensified. They say this happens when you feel under attack. "What about us?" I kept wanting to say. "What about our rights?"<\/p>\n

Our dinner ran late, so we missed Obama’s speech and we even missed the official No on 8 party. Upon leaving the restaurant all we saw was members of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus and other assorted folks out on the street, stunned and wondering what to do next. I spent the next few days fearing conversation with anyone who might not be thinking about Prop. 8 — anyone who would want to talk about Obama, or the weather, or our kids’ school, or anything not related to my pain. It was as though I was grieving and I didn’t want to be with anyone who wasn’t grieving too.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is exactly why I haven’t posted much here about Obama’s victory.  Yes, I’m grateful.  Especially so since a certain someone told me recently, that he’d have moved, possibly back to Germany, if McCain had won.  As he’s lived here in America most of his life, its not exactly like the old country is home now.  But for him, like for a lot of people, America had started to become a strange foreign land…a place where the American dream of liberty and justice for all had become a dirty joke.  A McCain victory would have been the final straw.  I’d have wanted to leave too then.  I wanted to leave after the 2004 election.  But I’m too old to immigrate anywhere unless I bring sacks of money along with me.  It’s good Obama won.  But how good…really?<\/p>\n

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So it breaks my heart — in fact, it’s pretty much inconceivable — to learn that Obama has asked anti-gay California pastor Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration.<\/p>\n

I could forgive Obama his tepid support for the No on 8 campaign. It was election time — he had to win. There are so many critical issues in front of him. He had to win.<\/p>\n

But he could have chosen any clergy member in the nation to deliver his invocation. So why one from the state where religion has so recently been a painful dividing line? One who spoke out so publicly in support of Prop 8, stating that "there is no need to change the universal, historical definition of marriage to appease 2 percent of our population … This is not a political issue — it is a moral issue that God has spoken clearly about"? One who continues to argue that marriage equality silences his religious views?<\/p>\n

Why re-open painful wounds?<\/p>\n

As unlikely as it seems, here’s hoping Obama will listen to reason and rescind his invitation. Here’s hoping I will finally, finally, be able to have my Obama moment.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He won’t.  He’s smarter then that.  Rescinding the invitation now would just make more headlines and keep the thing in the news that much longer.  But it’s a disaster.  Lee Stranahan, also over at the Huffington Post<\/a> , assures us that he understands our anger, but that the reality is most Americans agree with Warren on same sex marriage. <\/p>\n

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Like my comrades, I think Warren is dead wrong on same sex marriage. But the reality is that at the end of 2008, a majority of voters in California agreed with him. A majority of Americans agree with Warren about same sex marriage and many more states have made marriage equality unconstitutional than have ratified it.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Fine.  But Warren’s dagger at same-sex marriage was dipped in hate monger’s poison.  Here’s some reality for you: Warren said that same sex love was akin to incest.  He said that same sex couples were akin to pedophiles.  Stranahan urges us to embrace what we have in common with Warren…but what could any decent person have in common with that gutter crawling bigot, other then that we’re all breathing the same oxygen? <\/p>\n

This is being portrayed as an olive branch to the social conservatives, by a heterosexual news media that thinks the cheapshit hatreds of bar stool preachers like Warren are more legitimate, more real, more essentially American, then the love and devotion of same-sex couples.  But the betrayal here is larger then the gay community.  Obama’s election give the entire world hope.  That hope, for peace, for justice, for a re-awakening of the better part of human nature, is what was betrayed here.  <\/p>\n

Rick Warren is on record as saying America should feel free to assassinate foreign leaders if that is in its interests.   But when is political assassination ever in the interest of democracy, let alone the rule of law?  Reality.  Obama is about to sit down in the Oval Office in a world that has become so violent with hate, sectarian and nationalistic, that the possibility of world war III has practically become moot.  Hundreds of innocent people died in a series of co-ordinated terrorist attacks in India just a few weeks ago.  Reality.  And Obama choses a minister of hate to speak the words that begin his presidency.  There’s your reality Stranahan.  Look at it.  No…really look at it.\n<\/p>\n

You don’t heal the wounds in a people by spitting more poison on them.  You don’t bind a nation back together by giving the knife that cut it apart a place at the table.  You don’t offer an olive branch to your enemy while he’s still busy burning down the forest. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Isobel White over at Huffington Post pretty well sums it up … ike everyone else who cares about LGBT equality, election night brought a mix of joy as it became apparent Obama would win, and pain as we realized Prop. 8 would pass. My wife and I spent the evening in Union Square trying to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[53,18,20,90],"class_list":["post-2478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-feckless-democrats","tag-gratuitous-anti-gay-hate","tag-the-american-gutter","tag-the-human-gutter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2478\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}