Hate in the Rose Garden
The President of the United States is not a uniter, he is a panderer.
In his weekly radio address this weekend, he reiterated his support for the Federal [Anti-]Marriage Amendment. This man, and many in Congress, clearly feels that not giving legal protection to couples who are committed to each other is much more important than stopping the killings in Iraq, the crisis in Darfur, the inexorable degradation of the environment, the rise in anti-intellectualism, the lack of ethics in government, health care for all Americans, and a living wage for all workers.
What can you do? Get active! Write your officials! Pull out your wallet!
Become a member of the Human Rights Campaign . Have a postcard sent to Congress on your behalf. Check where your Senators stand, and write to them expressing your views!
June 4th, 2006 at 9:42 am
I had dinner with some folks a few nights ago - they talked about how the parents were issue voters. They were against the war in Iraq and a bunch of other Republican travesties, but they voted for Bush because they were rabidly anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage. I didn\’t get it. I didn\’t get how they could throw everything in to blocking issues that in no way affected them personally.
I was actually pretty gobstruck by this. You and I might think that Darfur or untrammelled plundering of our natural resources trumps blocking it being possible two men being able to make critical health care decisions for each other, but, lo and behold, seemingly reasonable Americans don\’t think that way.
I think I knew this on some level, I mean, the 04 election should have taught me, but I\’m wondering if rather than rallying Congress, which is not showing much gumption, there shouldn\’t be some grass roots action around educating the populace about More Important Issues. When forcing teenage girls to have unwanted babies and securing old fashioned notions of marriage is more critical than feeding the starving or destabilizing whole regions or ruining the planet, well, something is fucked up, no?
June 4th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
Indeed. I think one of the reasons why abortion and gay marriage are panderable issues is that the chicken littles threaten that society will decay around us if these movements are allowed to flourish. Thus, to many Americans these actually do feel like immediate threats and issues, more so than a remote war or eventual climate change. They haven’t thought things through, it seems to me, and realized that they are not threatened and society would be better off.
Then, of course, there are some people who feel, out of religious conviction or otherwise, that they have to tell people how to live….
I had an interesting idea last night: how about an adopt-a-church program, where we pair a progressive person and a right-wing church? That way we establish a dialogue, get to know each other beyond the caricatures, and, one hopes, show that progressives care about humanity and the planet just as anyone, and our gay selves or friends really lead lives that are just as ordinary and special as anyone else’s.
Too naïve?
June 5th, 2006 at 5:31 pm
Come on Victor, give the guy a break. He doesn’t really want to “kick the gays”. It’s an election year. He and the Republicans have to find somebody to blame for our nation’s problems. Otherwise people might just look at the party that controls the presidency, both houses of congress, the supreme court and the majority of the governorships. Can’t have that.