Month: November 2008

Email Of The Day

A reader writes:

I know you are very busy and will likely not read this message.  But as a loyal blog reader I felt I could express some of my thoughts to you. My partner and I (we’ve been a family for about 20 years) finally married last June.  We live in LA and come from loving and accepting families.  The approval of Proposition 8 is a terrible blow to us.  For the first time in so many years I feel pushed back into the psychosis and depression of the closet.

I am your age and have lived through many happy as well as very sad and dark times.  We are now plunged into another bad time.  I am fatigued from the battles.  I am disgusted that our fellow Californians can do this to my family and friends.

I beg my gay brothers and sisters: do not let them drive you back to the "psychosis and depression" of the closet. No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. Know that your love is real; cherish it; hold your spouses closer; build your families; take care of your kids; live your dream.

What the Christianists want is to destroy your self-esteem and self-worth. It’s over the wounded souls of gay people that they construct their politics of fear and division. But we endured centuries of cruelty, and after our first taste of liberation, we faced a plague of devastating proportions. But we came back stronger than ever. For the sake of those who never dreamed we would ever see civil unions, for those who died of the plague, for those whose marriages through the ages were never recognized but were as real as any backed by law: fight on. Do not lose faith.  Law never trumps love. And one day it will echo it.

The Blogger That Dare Not Speak His Name

A classic from Cheney-toady Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard:

One  writer for The Atlantic Monthly put it this way last week. "What I’ve learned from watching McCain these past two months is that there’s nothing he wouldn’t do if it could get him a small bump in a news cycle, polarize the electorate, and appeal to a rabid base that is now his only source of power." He added: "My view is that McCain has shown his character in this campaign: it’s vicious, petty, lazy, reckless, vain and dishonorable."

Is there now a rule at TWS as well as at NRO to never link and (almost) never cite my name? And, by the way, yes: McCain’s campaign was an ugly, hollow, vicious, cynical tragedy that deserved to lose by a much bigger margin that it did.

The Blow To Marriage Equality

Dale Carpenter has a sober, moving post. Money quote:

On Sunday, I spoke to a rally of about 100 of them in Vallejo. It was held in a park bordered by rolling and largely barren, brown hills, which funneled a chilly wind onto us. The park was empty. It was all gay and lesbian couples, many of them with young children. Some had gotten married already and others were planning to do so before the vote, just in case. They were wearing red and carrying signs. They were full of hope. They would be heading out that day to form a human sign constituting the words “No on 8" by the side of the freeway, trying to capture the attention and hearts of thousands of passing motorists in a state of 40 million people. It seemed an impossibly small group taking on a lot for themselves.

That’s how it always is. A few people, forging the future on their own, taking on the impossible, but making it more possible with every step they take. I feel very proud of how far we’ve come; and all the more determined to win.

Winning The War

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Joe Klein:

…this is a country whose President-elect’s middle name is Hussein. That is a fact to be celebrated. I received an email from a young friend, an entrepreneur in Kabul, this morning. He said, "We are all smiling now," and he attached a Pakistani press clipping–the Taliban greeted the new President and said they were ready to commence talks.

I wrote well over a year ago, when Obama was 20 points behind, and McCain written off:

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

We don’t have to imagine any more. It’s happening. And the forces for good in the world have been immeasurably strengthened as a consequence.

The Wrong Path To Equality?

Megan discusses prop 8:

In general, courts are the wrong place to press these sorts of claims.  The courts were appropriate for civil rights because blacks were literally denied the right to participate in the legislative democratic process.  And on a practical level, they worked because a majority of people in the country were more than happy to force civil rights on an unhappy white southern minority.  Unfortunately, too many groups have decided that the success of civil rights can be widely applied to circumvent the electorate on issues where there is no public consensus.  Now widespread gay marriage seems quite a bit less likely for the near term than it would have been had we attacked the issue legislatively.

If Megan believes we would even have a sliver of the protections we now have in civil unions and domestic partnerships if we hadn’t fought for marriage in the courts and legislatures, she’s mistaken.

You don’t get half a loaf by asking for half a loaf. You get half a loaf by asking for the whole thing. And we did. In California, the legislature had already passed marriage equality, and the worst that has happened is that we are left with full civil unions on a state level. My further thoughts here. But as someone who has focused almost entirely on the persuasion and advocacy part of the equation, as opposed to the legal part, I am proud of my brothers and sisters forging the case in the courts alongside. We may have gotten a tiny but ahead of ourselves. But when you look at the last two decades of struggle over this, I still cannot believe how far we’ve come, and how many souls we have already touched. That’s what endures. And in the end, triumphs.

The Grim Truth

Dan Savage:

I’m done pretending that the handful of racist gay white men out there—and they’re out there, and I think they’re scum—are a bigger problem for African Americans, gay and straight, than the huge numbers of homophobic African Americans are for gay Americans, whatever their color.

For gay and lesbian black men and women, the blow is even harder. But this community needs to be engaged not demonized, and we haven’t engaged enough. The black church is one of the most powerful forces fomenting homophobia in America, and has fostered attitudes that have literally killed countless gay black men. It’s time to Act Up against those elements that p.c. liberals have been too timid to confront. For the sake of African American gay and lesbian people as much as anyone else.