That’s very unfortunate. The problems of racial discrimination were not always obvious to everybody, you know. If they were, there never would have been a civil rights movement.
What you are calling objectivity sounds more like a lack of interest in things that don’t directly affect you. That’s not objective, it’s just narrow.
The wisest thing yet written in this thread. Anything that makes Rachel happy is worth it.
I would say it’s more discouraging than “Boring”. Once gays get equal rights, America will be one huge step closer to being ‘free’ place it considers itself to be. It is important.
I used to be on the fence about DADT and gay marraige.
I gave the military a lot of leeway on DADT because the military is different than normal society so I awaited the report on DADT. While it certainly didn’t show an effortless trouble free transition from a closeted gay military to an openly gay military, it was clear that this was not nearly as monumental a transition as women or blacks in combat.
Then I watched as Republicans shifted the goal posts. The only opinions that REALLY mattered were the ones of active combat troops in the marines and special forces. It became clear that if the only pocket or strong ersistance to repealing DADT came from the military chaplains, then the opinons of military chaplains would be the most important factor in determining military policies.
I used to think that civil unions were a good compromise and the gay community was being petulant insisting on the nomenclature. But after watching the Republican performance on DADT, it became clear that the majority of the concern over gay marriage was destigmatizing homosexuality. They wanted to stigmatize homosexuality not preserve the sanctity of marriage but to make sure that their borderline gay sons don’t end up sucking cocks in a bathroom on friday nights.
I used to be on the fence about DADT and gay marriage. That fence is barely a thin line on the horizon.
I agree with you. There’s been this idea running around, most famously in Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas, that the Pubs use social issues to distract their own voters’ attention away from economic issues. Yet to anyone with eyes to see, it’s obvious that liberal voters are the ones distracted by social issues and away from economic and foreign policy issues.
Take a look at this forum, which gives a pretty decent window onto what liberal minds are thinking about. How many threads have we had about gay marriage in the past five years? And compared to that, how many about the environmental dangers of coal mining, or human rights in Latin America, or exploitation of the poor by payday lenders? Some people show a keen interest in rights for a narrow slice of humanity and little interest in rights for humanity as a whole.
Liberals are winning slowly but surely on all issues related to gay rights. However, on global warming, liberals keep losing over and over. And on the wars in the Middle East, liberals keeps losing. And on making the rich pay a fair share in taxes, liberals keep losing. It’s a pattern.
That may be because gay rights issues are so cut and dried and well known that there is much puzzlement as to why gays are not being allowed to marry. Not to mention the fact that anyone who doesn’t want to allow gays to marry are incredibly amusing when they try to explain their position. With the other issues you’ve listed it’s not as cut and dried and the side issues are less known.
Huh?
So what if the government outlawed bondage?
I’m not sure what the debate here is. Should we try to spice up our civil rights struggles for Evil Captor’s entertainment? Or should we just live with discriminatory laws until we’ve solved all the bigger problems? Had we shrugged and said that we’d get to DADT repeal sometime later, maybe, would the Senate have passed cap-and-trade instead? How about if we had a jobs bill that could only get majority support if it also allowed employers to fire people based on the amount of bondage porn on their hard drives?
If an issue is not well known, isn’t that a reason to devote more attention to it? And in any case, all issues are cut and dried to some people.
I just want this stuff over & done with so we can deal with some things of global importance. When the press gives time to some twit who thinks Same-Sex Marriage is “the issue of our time,” it pisses me off. We live in an ear of profound environmental problems, & gay rights issues neither solve those nor solve the economic issues that distract & scare the populace away from solving them.
Given a choice between blatant persecution of gays or the loss of oceanic life, I’d rather have blatant persecution of gays. This is called* understanding scale.*
Thanks for putting it better than I could. It looks to me like most social issues are being manipulated to advance the wealthy conservatives’ economic agenda, with the willing connivance of Pubbies and the (possibly) unwilling connivance of Democrats. We’ll have a society that has become third world, with a very small wealthy elite and a huge mass of formerly middle class folks living an increasingly lower class lifestyle, but hey! Gays can get married! So it does not really matter!
And we could’ve prevented all this if we’d just left Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell alone?
You are asking so I will tell you … wait a minute … who am I, Cassandra? I can’t predict the future. But maybe some prioritization should be in order. “It’s the economy stupid” should have been on Obama’s desk since day one but he went for health care, which at least is arguably a very important issue for us all, but he didn’t affect the cost issue that is at the heart of health care issues, or the portability that also causes problems, and he left the jobs issue alone for way too long. Maybe if the left and the moderates had been VERY, VERY attentive on jobs and ignored DADT, health care, DOMA, and any bondage related laws anyone cared to bring up (though it kills me to give up Mandatory Ballgags for Fox News commentators) … if we’d expressed VERY LITTLE INTEREST in those things and GREAT INTEREST in getting the jobs engine going … MAYBE we would have gotten more movement, faster. I’m not sure we would have because I think the big banks have a lot of Dems as well as Pubbies in their pockets. But as it is …
I think you’re taking for granted that everybody has the same priorities you do. I don’t think Obama ignored the economy and I don’t think the government has o deal with one issue at a time. Even if it did, it’s the end of his second year in office. That would indicate this wasn’t a major priority.
Well I’m gay . . .
And I’m self-employed, so I shouldn’t care about unemployment.
And I have no kids, so I shouldn’t care about education.
And I’m too old to enlist, so I shouldn’t care about Iraq or Afghanistan.
And I’m on Medicare, so I shouldn’t care about health care reform.
And I’m white, so I shouldn’t care about racism.
And I’m male, so I shouldn’t care about sexism.
And I live in a nice suburban home, so I shouldn’t care about the homeless.
But for some strange reason I do care about these things. Why do you think that is?
Because you gay types are all empathetic and stuff?
Sure, but I was responding to your post connecting the preponderance of threads about gay marriage and how skewed the priorities of liberals are. I just gave you an alternative reason that makes doubtful the connection you were trying to make.
Obama did not ignore the ECONOMY but he did ignore JOBS and he also either ignored or did a damn poor job of relieving the middle class folks caught in the housing market collapse. He rescued the BANKS and the AUTO industry, throwing huge amounts of money at the banks so they would lend money and get the economy moving again, which the banks are OF COURSE unwilling to do now.
He did what every politician, Democrat and Republican, has done … he has truckled to the banks and the rich people … his decision to hire Geithner to clean up the mess he helped create should have been a clear indicator there …
As for priorities … some guy or gal, gay or straight, who is struggling to keep his home and to keep his family going after losing his or her job has problems that are ORDERS of MAGNITUDE bigger than Tim and Ted who can’t get married and are still employed. Maybe I’m way off base here … but I think YOU are the one who is way off base.
You figure that rescuing the banks and the auto industry = “ignoring jobs”, huh?
Interesting.
At any rate, you are setting up a ridiculous scenario in which all problems must be addressed in strict order of priority, and we may not move on to the next problem until the first one is “fixed.” When the problem to be “fixed” is something as large and complicated as the economy, it’s a bit silly to suggest that we shouldn’t do anything else – like, say, work on improving civil rights in this country – until it’s “fixed.”
You can certainly make a legitimate point that overall, economic issues are more important than gay rights. What is not legitimate is the suggestion that we cannot address gay rights until our economic problems are solved. We can, and in fact, have addressed both.
Yeah, I hate petty, selfish people who can’t see that having their civil rights trampled is nothing compared to MY problems.