Targets expanding to include more states, more churches, blacks**, and neighbors.
**Biased reporting in that one; it's the incidents I was concerned with.
I'm not taking a stance on the propositions; I'm just feeling the hope and change. Though it is interesting that in one case a majority vote is seen as 'of the people' in action, in another case it's just bad math/money-bought. Or something. Hypocrisy is often quite stunning in its audacity, but that's nothing new. Just apply that same math to the general election and it comes out...oh, I don't know...as the opposite of what actually happened? It's only valid if it comes out the way we want it to, don't you know. And if you don't like how it came out, just light fires.
I could look at this map all day and point out how ludicrous it is that Obama won, but according to the way our governance is set up, he did. Them's the breaks. Judicial activism may end up leading you to a place you don't like at all; best not to keep pushing for it - sort of like deciding on a jury trial instead of going before a judge - you take your chances when that happens. It's a roll of the dice at best, and considering how these votes have gone so far in the country, it's not a very safe one. Keep pushing for judges to usurp the legislature and make law from the bench, you end up with a jury of the voters - and that can go bad real easy. Now it'll be that much harder to get.
17 comments:
"And if you don't like how it came out, just light fires."
Ok, that made me have to wipe off my computer screen!
Can't all the reds just secede and leave the blues to crash and burn? I know I'd like to.
I think there’s another way to look at it...
The United States is a constitutional republic, not a democracy. The Constitution (in theory, at least) establishes and defends inalienable rights, including those of minorities, from the majority. It’s especially silly that the California Constitution can be amended by a mere simple majority.
The passing of Prop 8 isn’t democracy in action; it’s democracy devolving into tyranny, as Plato pointed out so sagely in the Republic. If my rights were being stripped away, I’d probably respond angrily, too.
Oh my. I believe I've been ABUNDANTLY clear that mobocracy (democracy) was never the intent of the founders of this nation? That said, that comment ends up being like irony piled upon irony piled upon irony piled on "wtf".
I'm going to go get myself a stiff drink and answer it when I can.
Yoni, I would like to know exactly WHERE in the California Constitution the right to gay marriage is enumerated.
I have known four lesbian couples who had ceremonies of "spiritual marriage" since they did not live in states with "civil unions".
Some of them had been living with their partners for as long as five years, but not one lasted more than two years after their public proclamation of their "commitment".
So gays in California are upset. I guess rioting, and threatening the straights is the PERFECT way to win hearts and minds of the rest of the population.
This is NOT STONEWALL!
This is not about cops raiding our bars, and arresting and abusing people.
Gay politics these days has NOTHING to do with equal rights, and everything to do with disrupting civil society. If you didn't notice, we are losing the goodwill we had in the 70's and 80's with the straight community.
Maybe it's stunts like crashing church services and throwing blood all over the parishioners, and alter...
The latest fun in California was black gays at the protests being called NIGGER by other gays....
Oh yeah, that just wins us LOTS of support.
Ripley
Histrionics, deception and exaggeration do not a strong argument make. At least with an audience trained in the fine art of baloney detection.
Regardless of whether or not the government should be in the marriage business (and I personally am sympathetic to the libertarian argument for getting the state out of it), both state and federal governments award married couples with over a thousand “special” rights. Extend all of those rights to any couple who wants them. The precedent in Perez v Sharp is clear. No church and indeed no individual should be forced to accept any union that violates their own personal morality, but equality before the law is paramount.
The divorce rates for same-sex couples who have married in Canada, Europe and Massachusetts no higher than the shockingly-high numbers for straight couples in the States. Famously, the first same-sex couple who married in California had been together for 55 years.
As for public acceptance... there has been no squandering of goodwill or loss of support for equality for homosexuals. Consider this: about 65% of voters over 65 voted Yes on Prop 8; about 65% of voters under 30 voted no.
But this is all secondary to the crux of my comment – I fear “majoritarianism.” I fear my rights being stripped away and the Constitution being shredded by a blissfully ignorant and greedy majority. I fear the federal government aggregating even more power and laying waste to what little federalism remains. I want my rights preserved... and the rights of those I hate and those I disagree with.
I'm pretty sure Ripley knows just a bit about public acceptance and goodwill. You know, firsthand.
I can even add a little bit to it from my own experience in the 70s in grammar school, somewhat before the ActUp and BashBack mentality started taking over. I had no less than 3 openly gay teachers. In grammar school. My 5th grade teacher had been in her position *forever* (she was a black woman in at least her late 50s) and was the most beloved teacher in the school, both by students and parents. She lived a quiet life with her "friend" and taught her students well, and with compassion. When we took up the habit of calling each other "fags" and "lezzies" (which wasn't meant in a sexual way at that age at that time; it was just another way of saying "asshole") she gave us a very stern lecture, and we stopped it. The same year our art teacher was a very flamboyant and sweet man who participated in more than one parade in NYC regarding gay rights. My hairdressers were gay men, who sure knew how to do hair - and ran a very successful business doing it. There was never any talk of whether these people should be teaching children (and they never taught anything untoward - we were kids), there was never any behind-the-hands talk about how scandalous it all was, or that these people shouldn't be living in this suburban community - they lived their lives, didn't bother anyone, and no one gave a shit what they did when the doors were closed.
So what changed between the days when Paul Lynde was openly gay and everyone loved him, when Liberace and Barry Manilow were the most beloved men of their times by countless housewives, when the most beloved teacher in a school was a black woman and a lesbian? Christianity isn't NEW to this country - is it really to be believed that suddenly Christians went berserk and started vilifying them for no reason?
Somehow I doubt it; things are never that simple.
At any rate, you topped the scale on the irony meter with this: "I fear my rights being stripped away and the Constitution being shredded by a blissfully ignorant and greedy majority. I fear the federal government aggregating even more power and laying waste to what little federalism remains. I want my rights preserved."
Yeah me too. Except I have no choice but to live under Obama right now who has promised with every fiber of his being to strip me of my rights and my property. So you're going to see a lot of people getting a lot more pissed off than the gays are right now...and they're the ones with the guns. Singing Kumbaya isn't going to cut it this time.
By the way, I don't argue about gay marriage - I don't think the government should be involved, and I don't think marriage is an inalienable civil right.
The POINT was the viciousness of the retaliation against churches and black people, etc. So you can can that horseshit about Ripley using histrionics, exaggeration and deception - this stuff IS happening, you don't get to pretend it isn't. Especially after you said you condoned it.
By histrionics do you refer to the mass temper tantrums in California? To the old lady having a cross ripped from her hands and being spat upon?
Or do you refer to the raid upon people worshiping in a church in Lansing, Michigan by "Bash Back"?
Does this win gays tolerance? I suggest that it wins us only enmity.
You say you fear majoritarianism? What is preferable? Diktats by judges in opposition to referenda? Really?
Marriage has legal and societal perks mainly because it has proven to be the most stable structure for raising children. My parents stayed married to each other until they died, and I am glad of it every day. I have encountered so many majorly screwed up people both gay and straight from broken homes, single mothers, or raised by grandparents.
Married people have special rights, well boo fucking hoo, men can pee standing up, but I see no reason to have a damned hissy fit about that fact.
I personally have noticed that over the years, straight people who find out I am gay are NOTICEABLY aloof with me... UNTIL they find out that I am not politically determined to shove anything down their throats.
By the same token, I find myself ostracized by gays because I refuse to wallow with them in their imagined victimization by society.
The only "stripping of constitutional rights" I am concerned about is having my taxes go up, my currency debased, and my gun rights restricted.
And it is not the "right" which threatens me.
Ripley
Annie, your comment can be translated thusly:
Some of my best friends were gay, so it’s okay for me to deny them rights.
It’s shocking to suggest that the days of forcing people to live in the closet were halcyon days that we should aspire to return to; the ‘50s were no great gay paradise. Liberace’s sexuality was no open secret and Manilow remains closeted out of fear of alienating older fans. What happened was that gays got “uppity” and the more fundamentalist strains of Christianity took issue.
And Christian tolerance is an issue entirely separate from the injustice of inequality before the law.
The instances of protests going over the top are few and far between. They are not endemic of the fight over this issue or the gay rights movement in general. Likewise, we cannot consider the case of Matthew Shephard as being a harbinger of some universal homophobia. Outliers are outliers. What a farce it would be if we could cherry-pick a few extreme examples and pretend they are a synecdoche of the whole.
My not-so-ironic comment was saying just that. Though it’s not as though there’s much left to the Constitution for Obama to trample upon. But I am worried by one thing you said: “So you’re going to see a lot of people getting a lot more pissed off than the gay are right now... and they’re the ones with the guns.”
I don’t want to make an improper inference, but what exactly do you mean?
As for Ripley... strawmen shouldn’t play with fire.
Talk about putting words in someone's mouth. That was simply ridiculous and frankly, pretty vicious. Apparently context and nuance are lost on you as well as irony.
I might or might not bother replying; having been completely misrepresented makes me cranky.
That crack at the end, by the way, is priceless. Pricelessly dumb is what I mean of course. Heh. I'd be pissed (as Ripley is a personal friend) but no point bothering.
My whole life I keep meeting people like you who figure that my political allegiance is owed by me to either the gay, or feminist "community". For all the deceitful rhetoric, feminists and queer politics are about collectivism, not individual freedom.
I have had adverse interactions with straight people who take issue with my sexuality. The real hatred I have encountered was from people supposedly ON MY SIDE, who felt they had the right to tell me what my politics and behavior, and speech should be. Is that the "freedom" you offer?
"Forcing people to live in the closet"?
Oh, Yoni, you are so oppressed!
The only thing standing between your joy and your misery is your legal right to marriage.
So when the public votes against it, and the courts intervene and overrule the will of the electorate, what really will change?
Will people give you respect you presently lack?
Good luck with that.
The American public is remarkably tolerant. Even amongst the most conservative people, most would acquiesce to "civil unions". You could have their tolerance, and that is all you have the right to expect. Acceptance and approval? That is slower to come, and it WILL NOT COME when we are seen to be acting like social anarchists.
Ripley
"Annie, your comment can be translated thusly:
Some of my best friends were gay, so it’s okay for me to deny them rights."
No. My comment can not correctly be translated thusly. My comment was with regard to Ripley's comment, which was that there DID exist goodwill in the 70s and 80s that has been squandered by subsequent ANGRY efforts by groups such as ActUp. I certainly realized that Barry and Liberace would be controversial in this equation, as well. At any rate, Ripley pointed to a certain amount of goodwill which existed in the 70s and 80s, and I was adding my own personal stories of OPENLY gay people in those eras.
"It’s shocking to suggest that the days of forcing people to live in the closet were halcyon days that we should aspire to return to; the ‘50s were no great gay paradise. Liberace’s sexuality was no open secret and Manilow remains closeted out of fear of alienating older fans."
Yes I anticipated this answer. You apparently think I'm stupid or ignorant - not so. What I pointed to was the ACTUAL goodwill enjoyed by gay people in the 70s (NOT THE CLOSETED 50s, duh!) where I knew OPENLY gay people who suffered no ill consequence IN THE 70s. Including TEACHING ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. Miss Brown was NOT "in the closet" as you suggest; she simply wasn't obnoxious - she taught her students tolerance and openly lived with her partner. The art teacher participated in gay pride parades and he WAS mocked by the students a bit (because he was SO flamboyant) but not by the parents. And this was in suburbia. No one waged war on these people. If by being "uppity" you mean waging war then yeah, that would have probably meant a fight - it didn't happen.
"What happened was that gays got “uppity” and the more fundamentalist strains of Christianity took issue."
Subjective. Having been there, I don't agree with your account.
"The instances of protests going over the top are few and far between."
Actually, I don't agree. ActUp has a very definite record. Fuck you.
"They are not endemic of the fight over this issue or the gay rights movement in general. Likewise, we cannot consider the case of Matthew Shephard as being a harbinger of some universal homophobia."
Or the case of the poor boy who was suffocated with a gas-soaked rag in the back of a van and raped and murdered by gay men, with a copy of NAMBLA, to be typical right?
"Outliers are outliers. What a farce it would be if we could cherry-pick a few extreme examples and pretend they are a synecdoche of the whole."
Yeah what a farce if we could put all the incidents together. I chose to spotlight a few incidents that DON'T get national coverage because the national media PROTECTS gays. Fuck off and die.
My not-so-ironic comment was saying just that. Though it’s not as though there’s much left to the Constitution for Obama to trample upon. But I am worried by one thing you said: “So you’re going to see a lot of people getting a lot more pissed off than the gay are right now... and they’re the ones with the guns.”
I don’t want to make an improper inference, but what exactly do you mean?
As for Ripley... strawmen shouldn’t play with fire.
And for fuck's sake I DON'T CARE ABOUT GAY MARRIAGE - Get the gov't out of marriage and shut the fuck up.
I also have - and, YONI (Yeah I know what that MEANS) - get out! It's ridiculous.
I was in a hurry and forgot to reply to the last bit - my bad:
"“So you’re going to see a lot of people getting a lot more pissed off than the gay are right now... and they’re the ones with the guns.”
You asked what I meant, as though it wasn't obvious. It was in reply to THIS: "If my rights were being stripped away, I’d probably respond angrily, too."
To which I replied: "Yeah me too. Except I have no choice but to live under Obama right now **who has promised with every fiber of his being to strip me of my rights and my property**. So you're going to see a lot of people getting a lot more pissed off than the gays are right now...and they're the ones with the guns."
The meaning should be obvious. As everyone's rights are stripped away to provide others with things that are not rights, and as Obamunist tries to go after gun owners and form a mandatory civilian security force and institute mandatory servitude, people are going to be a lot more pissed than any group thinks they are right now. I don't know if you've seen pissed yet.
I wonder if yona knows she totally gave herself away? Like, really badly.
She does now....
Humorless, Stalinist Hag.
Ripley
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