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| The father of the Gay Rights Movement, Frank Kameny |
It is refreshing to have a man of decent impulses and strong character and intelligence sitting in the oval office after the
previous two presidents. The
last president was an arrogant lightweight totally overwhelmed by the forces that enveloped him and
unable to navigate through the disastrous consequences of his policies. Every time he took to the
microphone he was an embarrassment to himself and his country. The way he spoke, the way he gestured,
the tics in his face made him unbearable and yet you could not hate him the way
you could easily hate Dick Cheney (or any of the Cheneys for that matter). His 8-year tenure was catastrophic and
object lesson #1 on how conservative governance is a failure. The last president was someone to be
pitied.
The president before that was by all accounts a brilliant
thinker with serious personal flaws. His political expedience set the course for DADT and the
Defense of Marriage Act which this current president has been undoing. It is precisely why many of us
disqualified his wife from ascending to the presidency. The truth is that for myself 2008
was as much about keeping him and his wife out as putting Obama in. If she has any plans for 2016, she
better start by clearly stating her support for marriage equality . She has been a loyal and very effective
Secretary of State but the Progressive base still views her with
suspicion.
President Obama got it right yesterday on the issue of
same-sex marriage. Either you
believe in equal rights for all Americans or you do not. I’m happy to see that the administration
is done catering to the likes of hucksters
like Rick Warren.
The flak from the right as usual was predictable. It’s been predictable for hundreds of
years in the United States. Conservatism
has always been allied with the most evil forces in American history and
life—slavery, segregation, anti-union, anti-women, and anti –gay. Throw in the worst sects of
Christianity and its odious anti-science fundamentalisms and you have a recipe
for the worst aspects of our country. But the arrogance of Conservatism means never having to ever apologize for always
being on the wrong side of history.
I don’t know how the politics of the President’s decision
will play out—the white working class has been doing the bidding of the Koch
Brothers and their ilk since Nixon.
These people keep getting poorer, their children keep getting dumber
while the Koch Brothers and the one percent get richer.
Imagine for a moment if the hard core red states somehow
were their own country. You would basically have a 2nd world country akin
to Eastern Europe. Is there
anything anyone wants from people in the red states? Oklahoma?
Mississippi? Perhaps that is part of the problem. Conservatives produce little that
anyone anywhere wants (except for Texas oil, but that’s a question of geographic
luck). Most if not all that is world class in the United States is
produced by/in liberal enclaves.
Higher education? Massachusetts.
High culture? New York City. High Tech? Silicon Valley. Film & Television? Los Angeles. Look at Washington State which even
voted Dukakis in 1988 during a Bush I landslide; that state has given the world Microsoft, Starbucks, and Costco (yes Costco is now worldwide). What does red state America offer
the world? Country music? Not anymore, even the golden age of the great
country music of the 1950s-1970s is a thing of the past.
The conservative mind is a terrible thing to ponder but like
dead football players whose brains are being studied for brain trauma caused by
concussions, we need to see why so many of them have gone off the deep
end. How is it that a proposal to
raise the top marginal tax rate by 3.5%
on the wealthiest Americans to what it was during Clinton’s term somehow
amounts to radical socialist redistributionist economic policy shows how the conservative
mind has become unhinged. It is a
mind filled with petty slights, jealousies, grudges and suspicions. It is tribal and focused on suspicions of the other, at the educated while always bowing to the wealthy.
At the root of all this is religion. Red state America is not
the future of the United States and not the future of the world. It’s religious fundamentalism makes it simpatico
with our enemies in the Islamic extremist world. I’m quite certain however that such superstitions as supreme
beings and gods of all stripes will be a relic of the past by the next turn of the century. That is part of what the 21st Century project will be about.
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