I had something else entirely queued up to publish today, but I think this video, which I saw this morning thanks to a Towleroad post is a better use of your time:
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Televangelists:
Watching this, seeing the clips John plays of televangelists telling people god will erase their debt if the just charge another thousand dollars to their credit card to donate to the “church” made me angry, but also very sad. I remembered a specific family in one of the churches I attended as a child (this was about 1972 or so) who sent a lot of money to one of the television preachers because he told them if they give “with faith” god would send it back “a hundred-fold!”
They did not get any money back of any kind: no windfall, no spontaneous arrival of a big raise or whatever. What they did get was a lot more money problems.
A Kentucky newspaper, the Lexington Herald-Leader has published a rather stern editorial about the thrice-divorced county clerk who is still defying the federal court order to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples and the hate-group paying for her lawyers: Time for Davis to do her job or resign. I’m just going to quote the main point:
Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis has chosen to prolong her moment in the limelight by defying a federal judge’s order to issue marriage licenses to legally qualifed people who apply for them.
U.S. District Judge David Bunning kindly but firmly told Davis Wednesday that in our system her religious beliefs don’t trump the rights of the taxpayers who pay her almost $80,000 annual salary. Sharing Davis’ glow is Liberty Counsel, which describes itself as a nonprofit that provides pro bono legal representation related to “religious freedom, the sanctity of life, and the family,” funded by tax-deductible donations and grants. In 2012 those gifts reached just over $3.5 million and in 2013 topped $4.1 million, according to IRS filings.
The husband and wife team who founded and run Liberty Counsel, Anita and Matthew Staver, were paid $137,758 and $153,591, respectively, in 2013. The staff of five ran up $184,479 in travel expenses that year and spent $429,584 on conferences, conventions and meetings. Liberty Counsel paid one independent contractor over $600,000 for “email alert services,” and another almost $500,000 for printing and mail services. “Case costs,” were reported at $105,487. Liberty’s attorneys know they can’t win the case in Rowan County.
Same-sex marriage is legal since the Supreme Court’s June 26 decision and it’s Davis’ job to issue marriage licenses. So, why is Liberty Counsel marching alongside Davis in this losing cause? It takes a lot to keep that marketing machine humming and those executives paid, and the only way to keep those donations coming is to stay in the news. For that purpose a losing cause is just as good as, perhaps better than, a winning one.
When I describe the Liberty Counsel as a hate group, that’s not just one queer’s opinion. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which has decades of experience fighting hate groups of many kinds, officially designated the Liberty Counsel a hate group some years ago, and lists them as a still active hate group.
GLAAD (the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) has more details about the on-going activities of the Liberty Counsel and it’s co-founder/leader, Mat Staver.
The editorial’s conclusion puts the whole affair quite succinctly: “Davis can resign if she’s morally unable to issue the marriage licenses while the appeal is pending. Law-abiding, taxpaying Rowan County citizens have been denied their constitutional rights for almost two months while Davis has kept her job and Liberty has ginned up its marketing machine.”
One of the links I included yesterday accused one of the young women who interrupted the rally of being a rightwing Christian whack-o, based on the fact that she attends Seattle Pacific University and has admitted online that when she was younger (as in, middle school aged) she was a Sarah Palin supporter. The piece I linked is hardly the only one of that nature I’ve seen online, with lots of people not understanding how someone who claims to be progressive could attend such a conservative school.
So let me just say that I am an extremely liberal (so liberal that I neither eschew the label “liberal” nor do I consider it an insult when someone calls me a socialist) queer man… and I attended Seattle Pacific University. Even harder for some people to believe: I attended that extremely conservative christian university back in the days when their policies still required “unrepentant homosexuals” to be expelled! (They have since lightened up only a little bit, and actually have allowed a straight-gay alliance type club to officially form on campus).
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: kids raised in extremely conservative families sometimes have to go to the kinds of schools their parents and community will support, even if they have outgrown their family’s rightwing beliefs. You get the education you can, and you go out into the world and make your way. I had some extremely good professors and will put the quality of the higher mathematics, physics, and rhetoric classes I took there against any other university you care to name. Also, some of the most fiercely progressive activists I have known have not only been Christian, they were ministers.
Anyway, I’m glad that they stood up and made their voices heard. I love Bernie Sanders, but I have to agree that until this happened, he hadn’t been connecting the dots in either his speeches or his campaign materials between his economic justice arguments and institutional racism. And we can’t solve the problems of economic disparity without addressing institutional bigotry that contributes to it.
I’ve seen a lot people, from reporters to pundits to ordinary folks, make the specific claim that Donald Trump is in the lead among Republican voters not because they agree with his crazy racist and misogynist comments, but because they know his comments drive “liberals” nuts. These folks usually go on to say that eventually the Republican voters will get serious and vote for one of the other candidates once they’re finished yanking our chains. The unspoken proposition in that reasoning is that some of the other candidates are less racist and/or less misogynist than Trump is.
And I can’t figure out how anyone who has actually heard any of them talk could think that.
I said, half-jokingly, that I wasn’t going to watch the debates last week because I’d wind up drinking an unhealthy amount of alcohol to get through it. I have a much bigger reason not to listen to it: there is no policy differences between any of the 17 Republican candidates. None.
All of them want to de-fund Planned Parenthood.
All of them are opposed to marriage equality in particular and gay rights in general (yes, even former Governor Kasich, don’t let his sound byte about attending a “gay marriage” distract you from his decades of voting against and vetoing gay rights bills, funding for heatlh care for domestic partners of state employees, gay adoption, and so on).
All of them are opposed to a woman’s right to choose.
All of them are opposed to raising the minimum wage.
All of them are apposed to restrictions on the same banking and financial institutions that destroyed the economy.
All of them are in favor of more war.
All of them want to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
All of them want to cut taxes even further on the rich.
All of them want to take away the few remaining protections workers have in the work place.
None of them want to do anything about climate change.
All of them favor some flavor of “religious liberty” laws that allow people to discriminate.
All of them oppose anti-bullying programs in public schools that don’t have religious exemptions allowing Christian kids to bully their queer classmates.
All of them try to blame problems in the economy caused by some of their other policies on immigrants.
All of them want states to be able to enact more laws designed to keep poor and minority voters from voting…
I could keep going. But, seriously, the only thing that differentiates any of them is the tone of arguments they make on those issues, and which of those things they think is more important. But they’re all in favor of racist and misogynist policies. Each and every one of them. And they believe all of those things because the Republican base supports all of that.
To be fair, a lot of the base is sincere when they claim not to be bigots. This isn’t to say that they aren’t bigots, I’m just saying that they sincerely believe that they aren’t. It’s like one of my relatives who sends me sad messages wondering why my husband and I didn’t come to her Independence Day barbecue, the same day she was posting long tirades on Facebook about how god is going to destroy america because of marriage equality. She doesn’t see the contradiction between claiming she loves and respects us, her gay nephew and his husband, while also insisting that our love is an abomination that is going to cause an apocalypse.
Similarly, they have no qualms getting angry at the Black Lives Matter protestors by insisting “the blacks” should be grateful to the police for all the good they do. And “those blacks” shouldn’t be out protesting because of a “thug” who got what was coming to him. And if “those blacks” had real jobs instead of “taking welfare all the time” they wouldn’t have time to be protesting. But they insist they aren’t racist and it is a terrible slander for someone like me to point it out. Oh, and how dare I be offended about the confederate flag when “that damn president covered the white house in the immoral rainbow after the gay marriage ruling!”
But they aren’t bigots, no, not at all.
One of the local news people, when he expressed the hope that all this apparent support for the candidate saying the most obviously racist and misogynist things is some sort of put-on, said he did so because he hoped that the American people weren’t that bigoted. “The majority can’t really believe that stuff, can they?” The problem he’s having is the assumption that the Republican base represents the American population as a whole.
Let’s do some very rough math. In the last presidential election, the Republican candidate got only 47% of the vote. Less than a majority. And we know from other polling that the got less than a third of the so-called swing voters (that notion is worth its own blog post). So let’s say that roughly 45% of the population aligns with the Republicans. Other statistics show us that less than one-third of voters participate in primaries and caucuses. So that means that at most, 15% of the population falls into the category of “likely Republican primary voter.” And at most, 25% of those people support Donald Trump. So, 25% of 15% leaves us with 3.75%. In other words, less than 4% of all voters support the blatantly racist, misogynist b.s. that Trump is spewing.
Unfortunately, other polling indicates that at least 60% of likely Republican voters oppose gay rights, pro-choice policies, and civil rights protections. Which is why the other 16 clowns officially in the race for the nomination all have policies statements that align with Trump’s, they’re just a bit more genteel in their language (some times). But lest you despair, that’s 60% of the 45% mentioned earlier. So while these positions will continue to dominate the Republican party, by sticking to these ideas the candidates are only appealing to 27% of the entire electorate; in the process alienating most of the remaining 73%.
So it isn’t likely to be a winning strategy in the end. And while it’s scary to realize there are folks who feel that way, I think it’s good that things like this remind us who they are.
In the his first podcast recorded after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality, Dan Savage explained how he no longer felt any urge to argue with the haters. No matter what messages they sent, no matter what outrageous thing he’d read them saying about marriage, his reaction was no longer to get irritated and start arguing. And he admitted it was a bit of a surprise. “I realized that I’m just over it. They have lost.” And listening to him, I recognized that I was feeling much the same way. I’m still annoyed that so many state and local officials are fighting it, and the BS religious liberty laws still get my dander up, but I know what he means. The court based its ruling on the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. They’re done. The haters can’t win.
The Fourteenth Amendment was passed in the wake of the Civil War, and it is specifically about rights of the citizens which can never be denied by states. The entire point was to try to prevent individual states from denying fundamental rights to citizens under states’ rights claim. No matter what argument they put forward, eventually a Federal Court is going to look at their case, will point to Justice Kennedy’s ruling, and will order the county or the state or the judge to comply. They’re done. It’s over. I find I don’t feel the slightest urge to click on headlines about some clerk or some judge or whoever refusing to issue licenses. I was reading them during the first week or so after the ruling, but my righteous indignation has moved on in regards to that specific issue.
Not everyone has. I get reminded of that every time I stray onto Facebook and accidentally see anything posted by most of my relatives. And some of the people who haven’t moved on are being complete dicks about it, angrily going off on people who have done nothing more than use the rainbow filter on their user picture on social media. Fortunately, there are plenty of people who feel the other way: Restaurant Owner Overwhelmed By New Business After Standing Up To An Anti-Gay Bully My favorite line: “food does not judge and everyone is welcome under a roof of love here!”
Meanwhile, because the Supreme Court ruling casts the right to marry as a fundamental right under the Fourteenth Amendment, Same-Sex Couples Are Securing Retroactive Recognition Of Their Marriages. Again, it’s a matter of fundamental rights that belong to everyone under the law, which means that they always ought to have been available.
Of course, a lot of people understand that the battle is over. Some of them have understood for a while, and have stopped supporting the organizations whose only mission is to take away marriage rights from queers (and before that they opposed civil unions), as well as take any other rights they can think of. As their fundraising has dropped off, they’re becoming more transparently desperate for cash: And now NOM is literally pleading with its (theoretical) supporters. Their fall has been predicted for a while now. I have had no doubt myself once the tide turned.
One of my favorite bits from the 2014 Slate article:
At every turn, NOM has played dirty, illegally keeping its donor lists secret and actively hiding its fundraising reports from ethics commissions. Its unprecedented campaigns against equality-minded judges represent a shocking encroachment upon judicial independence. And its constant barrage of ad hominem attacks against LGBTQ Americans turned a political campaign into a vicious assault on gay people’s dignity.
—Mark Joseph Stern, writing for Slate
There is an important detail that they have left out of the article: that 2.5 million dollar debt? It’s actually part of an even larger “loan” that their non-political “charity” made to the political arm a couple of years ago. The “charity” other money was raised under IRS rules that say it cannot be used for political purposes. So it’s a teensy bit unethical to loan it for political activity, though technically not illegal. Unless they don’t pay it back. Which, at the rate their fundraising has fallen off a cliff, I suspect they won’t.
It’s so bad, that when as part of his campaign finance statements made after the 2012 election ended (so after 2012), even Mitt Romney’s people felt the need to distance themselves from the donations the Romneys had made to NOM earlier. He’s not running for any office, any longer, and he’s probably the most famous living Mormon right now, so most everyone assumes he’s opposed to marriage equality, yet even he felt the need to minimize his involvement in the fight against marriage equality.
At least some people can read the writing on the wall…
I heard the news that there had been a shooting Thursday in the International District (a place some people still call Chinatown), but I didn’t know that it was Donnie Chin until Friday: Donnie Chin, Chinatown ID’s ‘frontline hero,’ killed in early morning shooting. He’d been the director of the International District Emergency Center for some years. The IDEC is hard to describe. A “volunteer-based emergency services organization” Yes, they provided emergency medical services, but Donnie did so much more. He got homeless people to shelters, he helped find lost children. He checked regularly on elderly and disabled residents. He provided translation services for people whose English was not good, helping them navigate the medicare system and so forth. They say a lot of elderly people who realized their memory was getting bad, actually left their prescriptions with him, and he came to their homes and gave them their pills for the day, so they wouldn’t accidentally overdose themselves. On top of all that, he simply patrolled the neighborhood, keeping an eye out for trouble.
I didn’t know Donnie personally. I first heard of Donnie back in the 90s, when I was briefly dating a guy who was active in the Q-Patrol (Donnie wasn’t involved in Q-Patrol, it’s that some of the people in Q-Patrol were trying to model what they did on the things that Donnie and his organization did in the International District). And I remember when one of the local papers ran a nice story on him a few years later.
What can I say, except that we’ve lost a hero?
In other regional news, there was some good news yesterday: Court sides with state on Plan B sales. When you’re a pharmacist, your job is to provide medication, not impose your religious beliefs on others. And the court agrees. I go further: I think that refusing to provide Plan B because they think it is an abortion drug is proof that the pharmacist is incompetent at the science side (it isn’t abortion, the biochemical process prevents implantation, just like birth control methods taken before the act), and should have their license revoked. But I’m a hard ass.
A tweet whose image is being shared around on various social media.And of course, Lafayette Shooter Was A White Supremacist Tea Party Type. Yes. And in case there is any doubt, La. gunman was a Tea Partier who hated Obama, admired Hitler and wanted women to shut up in church where we also learn, “Houser was turned down for a concealed carry permit in 2006 because of apparent mental health issues and a previous arrest in Columbus, Georgia, for arson.” And I already know that since the mass shooting of 20 grade school children a few years ago couldn’t get America off its collective butt and pull its head out of its arse and admit that there is something seriously wrong with the gun laws in this country, I know an angry man killing two women and injuring nine others in a movie theatre isn’t going to do anything, either. One thing I want to observe: some of the headlines and summaries describe it as if it was blindly shooting into the crowd, but that isn’t what witnesses described. He slowly, silently, and methodically shot at individuals. I suspect it is no coincidence at all that the two fatalities were young women. Angry misogynist murders women at showing of film by feminist comedian; police worry “we may not find a motive.”
As the number of people officially announcing their candidacy for the Republican nominee for president keeps going up and up, I’ve noticed a lot of people making the same lame meta-joke: “Looks like instead of a clown car, we need a clown van.” This joke, besides being lame because each political observer has been repeating the van comment several times, is bad because it completely misunderstands the whole point of calling the field of potential candidates a clown car to begin with…Continue reading Of clowns, cars, and twits→
The folks at Queerty.Com have asked comedian Sam Kalidi to create a new meme each week for Queerty readers. This is this weeks. They want you to share it! (Click to embiggen)Yesterday’s Friday Links was epically longer than usual. There was just so much crazy news this last week!
Individuals like Tony Perkins and Bryan Fischer and organizations such as the National Organization for Marriage, the Family Research Council, or the American Family Association want a resistance against marriage equality… As if they are puppeteers, anti-gay organizations and personalities are pulling the strings, buoying the arrogance and recklessness of clerks and various other government officials and thereby manipulating them to refuse to carry out their duties… Anti-gay groups are attempting to manipulate us all into an unnecessary holy war in which they hope to reap the benefits of pointing and saying “see, we told you so.”
Related, there are a couple of stories making the rounds (particularly on the Facebook pages of your most conservative relatives and former classmates) that are trying to fan the same flames: Gay Man Sues Bible Publisher For $70M For Causing Him Distress, Turns Out He’s Not Crazy. While he isn’t crazy in that there are some big problems with Biblical translations, he filed the suit seven years ago and it was thrown out. The other one is partially true and current, but there is a very important detail being left out: Oregon bakers forced to pay $135,000 after sharing lesbian couple’s home address. So the fine isn’t for refusing to sell the cake, it’s for publishing private information of customers (who they refused) leading to so many death threats to the couple, the social services almost removed foster children from the home for fear that those loving Christians leaving the death threats might actually follow through.
Completely unrelated to all of that: one particular link in yesterday’s post caused one friend to stop reading and send me a message to tell me it stopped him from looking at the rest. It was a story about a particularly awful child abuse incident which I put under the heading “This Week in Heart-wrenching” because like any child abuse case it was heart-wrenching. This is not the first time someone has told me they wish I wouldn’t include bad news in the links.
I don’t want to get into a weird pedantic argument about what constitutes bad news, other than to say that each person who has made that request has also, at other times, commented on other links to things that someone would classify as bad news in ways indicating that they were glad I linked to it.
But I do want to talk a little bit about why I include links like that. One of the other links under the same heading was about efforts to identify the body of a dead child. I believe that as a human being (let alone a citizen), I have an obligation to that murdered child. She deserves to be buried with her name. She deserves to have law enforcement find out how she was murdered and at least attempt to bring her killers to justice. Both of those things require that she be identified. If I can increase the chances, no matter how little, by sharing the link to the artist’s reconstruction of her face, I think I should do it. That one, for me, is a no-brainer.
Also, literally no-brainer in that the reason both of those links ended up in Friday Links was because I saw the headline in my news aggregator, I clicked on it out of emotional reaction. Then I read the stories. They were both heart-wrenching, and I tapped the share link to send to my list for Friday Links as a totally visceral, emotional, non-rational surge of “Oh My Goodness! This is too horrible to be ignored!”
That’s how those sorts of stories get into the list.
For a long, long time sex advice columnist, gay rights activist, and Seattle gadfly Dan Savage has had a continuing feature on the blog of the local alternative weekly’s paper called “Every Child Deserves a Mother and a Father.” He started it because, when he and his husband adopted a baby 17-or-so years ago, they began being harassed by even more threats, hit-pieces in conservative news sources, and so forth by various anti-gay people. The charge that the reason queer couples shouldn’t be allowed to adopt, shouldn’t be allowed to have civil unions, and shouldn’t be allowed to marry is always couched in an argument that children can only properly and lovingly be raised by a pair of opposite-sex parents because reasons. The argument usually summed up as “every child deserves a mother and a father. So any time a story of a straight couple abusing (sometimes to the point of murdering) a child crossed his news feed, Dan would share it under the “Every Child Deserves a Mother and a Father” heading. His point being that the mere fact that the adults raising a child don’t have matching genitals never guarantees that the children will be loved and cared for.
This feature always drew its detractors, too. “You don’t have to share these horrible stories to make your point,” or “Don’t make it sound like you’re happy to have your point proven correct” et cetera. For a while in reaction to those comments, Dan started including links to charities such as The National Children’s Alliance or The Child Help Foundation, giving those of us who read the stories of the horrible abuse an option to do something to help. Which maybe I should do the next time one of these stories winds up ripping my heart out and making we want to share the story.
I didn’t include the story because I was trying to make a political statement. I included it because it was heart wrenching, because I think it is too horrible to be ignored. I can’t save either of those kids. Sharing the news won’t bring either one back. But pretending I don’t know about their deaths doesn’t do anything to prevent other cases like theirs, either.
I don’t have any clever conclusion to this digression. All I can say is that there is a National Child Abuse Hotline (1-800-4-A-Child/1-800-422-4453) that anyone can call if you suspect a child is in danger and you’re not sure who to notify. There is a lot of social pressure to hope for the best, to assume that the parent or significant other of the parent is just having a bad day. There is a fear of getting an innocent person in trouble. And there is an aversion to even thinking about the bad things that might be happening out of sight. All of those things contribute to cases like the sad one I linked to Friday.
So I share it as a reminder that there are awful people in this world who don’t always look awful. To make us mindful. To, maybe, encourage someone who has seen something like this, to call someone before the next child dies.
National Child Abuse Hotline (1-800-4-A-Child/1-800-422-4453)
MemeoGraphs.Com (Click to embiggen)So CatholicVote.Org, a political action organization that tries to portray itself as serious but is known far and wide as a haven for the most bigoted of wingnuts, put out a video depicting people who discriminate on the basis of their religious beliefs as victims. To call it ridiculous, melodramatic, ludicrous, or even batshit stupid would be an insult to actual bat guano.
MemeGraphs.Com posted a review pointing out that the video has received over 1 million views, far surpassing any previous video by the group by more that 800,000 views. Unfortunately, it’s also gotten 30,000 thumbs down and and even for YouTube a truly amazing number of negative comments. Here’s the best part of the MemeGraphs review:
The auteurs at Catholic Vote have created an instant classic Christian cinematic masterpiece to rival Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas. Not since National Organization for Marriage’s “Gathering Storm” of 2008 have we seen delusional hyperbole, paranoia and self-pity lifted to such delirious heights. Like an episode of The Bachelor or a Lindsey Lohan court appearance, Not Alone is both terrifying and impossible to look away from. This important piece of filmmaking will surely inspire countless imitators, but Not Alone is so earnest in its own clueless, privileged insensitivity that parody may be superfluous (see Poe’s Law). Still, I look forward to seeing what influence this motion picture exerts on Stephen Colbert and the creative staff at The Daily Show, Funny or Die and Saturday Night Live.
As always, the bigots are completely unaware for their own deeply tragic irony. One of the lines from their video lamenting the fact that they are no longer allowed to discriminate against gay people is, “No one should be looked down upon, no one should be suppressed or their views be suppressed.” Unless, of course, you’re a gay or lesbian or bisexual person, then you should be looked down upon, you should be told to keep your feelings to yourself, to hide your relationships, and most definitely not get any legal rights to visit your dying partner in the hospital or not be kicked out of your home by bigoted relatives when a partner becomes incapacitated. Then, of course, you should be suppressed, looked down upon, and told to stop complaining.
Soundly Awake made a nice and funny video assuring Catholic Vote that they’re not alone:
People claiming to speak for Catholics aren’t the only ones flipping out. Presidential hopeful (and Baptist minister) Mike Huckabee has doubled-down on his calls to “protect religious liberty” in an opinion piece for Fox News (which I will not directly link to it (here’s the Do Not Link link, if you don’t want to go to Fox News, If You Only News has a nice summary) where he vows to issue executive orders to protect hospitals, public schools, private business’ et cetera religious liberty to discriminate against gay people. Hospitals. Can’t you just feel the christian compassion?
Meanwhile Scott Walker, another clown with presidential aspirations, thinks that the reason we celebrate Independence Day is because we don’t want government. Except that’s completely wrong. Independence Day, and the Declaration of Independence, are about our right to form our own government. Which is a very different thing. His official campaign email also manages to mix up the 4th of July with Veteran’s Day and to make it all about america’s founding being about god. (Forgetting that important clause of the Treaty of Tripoli, “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion” which was initiated by George Washington near the end of his last term in office, signed by Secretary of State John Marshall, submitted to the Senate by newly elected President John Adams, ratified by said Senate in a unanimous vote in the 7th of June, 1897, and affirmed in a signing statement by John Adams).
But enough of these people who don’t know what Independence Day is all about. Please enjoy this, one of my favorite songs from the musical, 1776:
TheMetaPicture.com (Click to embiggen)My plan had been to wrap up most of the Hugo reviews with a couple more posts this week, since last week my blog was extra special über queer what with the final week before the Seattle Pride Parade and the marriage equality ruling. I failed to take into account how much the heat is sapping me of energy each day, among other interesting complications of the weekend. And then I saw this story: Orthodox Jews Can’t Protest Gay Pride Parade, Hire Mexicans Instead.
They hired people to protest for them.
It didn’t surprise me when the douche-iest presidential candidate, Donald Trump reportedly paid actors $50 to cheer for him at his 2016 announcement. (I especially liked one post I saw about this, someone photographed one of Trump’s employees collecting the “home made” signs and t-shirts from the actors afterward). But come on, if these are your sincerely held religious beliefs that us queers are evil or going to hell or luring other people into sin or whatever, you should have the stones to show up and protest. You don’t hire immigrant day laborers to be your poxies!
The Jewish groups outsourcing their hate got me searching for any more stories about protestors at the parade, and there were a few protests within some of the parades intended to remind us that there are still plenty of other civil rights battles left for the queer community. And there was a story of one protester at one of the smaller town parades yesterday who got his sign stolen by one of the parade marchers.
All the rightwing Christian sites had headlines yesterday about ‘thousands protesting gay pride parades’… except it was in Korea. They couldn’t come up with anything like that happening here.
Surveys show that at least 57% of Americans are in favor of gays marrying. And they also show that 63% think that gays should be legally allowed to marry (the discrepancy presumably meaning that about 6% of the population believing personally that gays oughtn’t marry, but that it shouldn’t be illegal for consenting adults to do it if they want to). Experience over the last decade has been that about a year after marriage equality becomes legal in a particular state, support for marriage equality jumps up by at least another 10%, with opposition shrinking. Lots of states have had marriage equality for a while, so the nationwide number probably isn’t going to jump that much, but it will jump.
When you add in the decades-long trend of support for any specific gay rights question increasing by about 2 percent a year, that 37% of the population sincerely and deeply opposed to it will just keep shrinking. I don’t know how tiny it will get, eventually. Will it be as infinitesimal as the percentage of people who think that women should have the right to vote taken away (estimated at less than two one-hundredths of a single percent)?
Maybe in a few generations. I think in the foreseeable future it’s going to drop down to about 22% and then hover there for a long time.
One may ask why is seems like all of the Republican presidential hopefuls went ballistically, foaming-at-the-mouth anti-gay starting on Friday when nearly two-thirds of Americans support marriage equality. The reason is that Republican primary voters are not at all representative of the country as a whole. Likely Republican primary voters oppose marriage equality at almost inverse rates of the population at large: 60% oppose, less than 30% support, and the rest are undecided.
Even the few Republican candidates who intend to try to sell themselves as moderates to the general electorate know that they have to get those hardcore haters to vote for them in the primaries in order to become the nominee. And let’s be frank, on most of the issues voters care about, all 16 or 17 or however many we’re officially up to now of the Republican candidates have extremely similar positions. Most of them have name recognition problems at this point in the campaign. The only way they can break out of the pack at this point is to latch onto something that some of those hardcore voters care deeply enough about to remember when the primaries actually roll around.
So despite the fact that a lot of the more mainstream Republican pundits and so forth were hoping that a Supreme Court win for the gays would finally take this issue away as a wedge issue that drives moderate voters to the Democrats, I don’t think they’re going to get their wish.
That’s the problem when you hitch your wagon to hate and anger.
I know how easy it is to obsess over a horrific story like this. But the nine people who were murdered in a hateful act of racist terrorism in a historic church this week deserve to be remembered. And we can’t solve problems like racism if we don’t confront the problem.
Font Folly 