Another gay friend of mine writes:
When it comes to civil rights (and gay marriage is a civil right), then I have little sympathy for those who wish to bargain away my rights. Would you tell blacks to accept continuing discrimination and hatred so that we could elect Kerry/Edwards? I always find it amusing when breeders, ooops, heterosexuals bargain away my rights in the name of expediency.
“Who you callin’ ‘breeder’,” snarled the childless Radical. 😉 I’m not telling you to accept continuing discrimination. I’m just telling you to vote in your own best interest, and you already know that vote isn’t for Bush.
Understand first that I completely agree with you. Homosexual rights is (are?) the most important civil rights issue of my generation. I believe my nieces’ kids will look back at the gay-bashing of the late 20th-century like we look at the lynchings of the early 20th-century.
However, there have been many times in our past when civil rights have been bargained. Without the 3/5ths Compromise, we might not even be an independent country. Various pre-Civil-War politics, like the Missouri Compromise, held a fractious infant country together.
Was it right? I guess that depends on whether you hold a long-term or short-term view of morality. In the short-term, denying gay marriage rights is just plain wrong. We agree here.
But in the long-term, it just may be right. Suppose Kerry/Edwards do the right thing and say they are for gay marriage. Suppose just enough homophobic swing voters tilt to the Bush column. Suppose that’s enough to get Bush elected. Suppose 2, 3, or 4 Supreme Court justices retire in the next four years. Suppose Bush, with no resistance from a Republican Congress, installs judges that lean farther right than Antonin Scalia on a duck-hunting boat listing starboard.
Is it possible that a principled stance for gay marriage now may mean a court that not only denies gay civil rights, but also removes women’s reproductive choices and everyone’s free speech, free assembly, and personal privacy rights? Welcome to the stinky trough of politics.
Again, I have very little personal stake in much of this; I’m a middle-aged married white heterosexual. But even I had to hold my nose while voting for Bill Clinton in 1996, knowing that his administration trumped all those before him in locking up non-violent potheads. I had to vote for a guy that openly called for locking me up. At least Kerry/Edwards aren’t trying to lock you up.
This gay marriage issue is such a red herring in this election. It’s a shame that Kerry/Edwards have to sacrifice principle at the altar of political expediency. But these types of cultural shifts are glacial in pace — be patient. How long did it take us to go from black slavery to full recognition of interracial marriage?
You will have your marriage rights, I predict within the next two presidential terms. But it’s the Supreme Court that will give them to you, not President Kerry.
So, I will vote for Kerry/Edwards in the fall, but that check I was planning on sending them (which would have meant more than my vote here in Republican heavy Texas) has been discarded.
I think that is the best remedy you could have exercised. You have my vote, but not my money. I like it. In fact, I did exactly the same thing to Representative Wu here in Oregon. I wrote him a letter telling him that his vote against the Hinchey/Rohrabacher amendment was wrong, especially considering he represents a state that was one of the first to legalize medical marijuana. I told him he still has my vote but not my financial or volunteer support, and that I will be supporting a Democratic challenger in the next primary.
“Radical” Russ — I find it amusing that the righties fight against “perverse, promiscuous” homosexuality because of the threat to “family values”, but when the homosexuals want to marry and live according to “family values”, they’re against that, too… like Bill Maher said, “a rational person looks at the world and realizes, ‘you know, some people are just Judy-Garland-Over-the-Rainbow gay’.”…
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