I’m saying that the use of the term “LGBTQ+” in the Democratic Party platform is an indication of the influence of the hard-left, or at least the committed left wing in Democratic Party internal politics. There was no need to put gay issues into the Democratic Party platform. Very few voters care about Labor Department directives. I’m guessing that if I hadn’t brought it up, few participants in this thread would be aware of it. But there’s a hard-left faction that embraces gay issues and uses the “LGBTQ+” label for gay issues. They got the term into the Democratic Party platform. So any statement that the Democratic Party isn’t influenced by its left wing is false.
You know who is often Q+?
Teenagers coming to terms with their sexuality in a changing world.
You know who is the next generation of Democratic voters?
Also teenagers. If they can be arsed to vote, which they by and large cannot—but throwing them a bone instead of just the moneyed establishment is a step towards bringing them into the tent.
A bird in the hand (existing voters who don’t care about Q+ issues) is worth a fraction of a bird in the bush (Q+ people), but it’s part and parcel of the party’s commitment to welcome everyone, which is pretty core to the Democrat’s messaging if not their governing strategy.
The fact that you consider supporting equal rights for gay people as a “hard left” position is indicative of the extent to which antipathy towards queer people is baked into right-wing politics.
The nonsense of that line is that you ignore that the groups that pushed creationism and failed are virtually the same that started the current word games used in their efforts to whitewash law and history now.
Very tricky because you have to identify some folks on the borderline that you are going to try to bring over to our side, who you thus don’t trust, by sending them a love bomb.
I just read something not written in these terms, but I think it qualifies:
Here’s How We Fix the Electoral Count Act
Right now, the reason we lost, or are about to, is that the GOP will probably win control of Congress for the 2024 presidential vote count. The proposal in my link is to turn that count over to a group we know for sure is GOP — the Supreme Court. I don’t see any better opportunity to show bipartisanship.
P.S. Of course, I don’t think the GOP Supreme Court will then uphold Roe. I just think that if we invite them to uphold democracy, they probably will do that.
Disliking goofy and ever-morphing language used mainly to virtue signal such as LGBTQQIP2SAA or Latinx is not necessarily a dislike of the people the goofy lump under said label.
No, of course not. It’s obvious that I’m characterizing the motivations of the people who oppose teaching accurate history of race relations in the US, not suggesting curriculum.
No one* is teaching high school students that they should feel guilty for being white, or they’re bad because they’re white. It’s hard to imagine that’s even an accurate characterization of kooky college professors, although I’m sure you could find a few examples there.
Your thought process seems to be: let’s find the most extreme tweet from a kook and then tell everyone that’s what they want to teach all kids in high school. It’s not a characterization of a real position.
- I mean, sure, you can probably fine one or two kooky teachers teaching anything, but no district is seriously considering adding “tell white people they’re evil for being white” to their curriculum.
Oh no, imagine if we spent hours in high school on a critical issue that affects millions of people every day and is at the core of how our society operates. We could be better spending that time teaching them the names of explorers they’ll forget in 2 days or some equally important trivia.
We should teach them about slavery, about segregation, about Jim Crow. So why not redlining? Why not the systemic forces acting unjustly against minorities, particularly African Americans?
I’m not saying we should tell them they’re evil for being born white or whatever insane straw men you want to come up with, I’m saying that we should have a realistic, accurate, factual teaching of what actually happened in this country and how those effects have lasted until today. I’m not some social justice warrior extremist - I just think kids should know the real fucking history of this country and not some fucking rah rah version that the south would like to teach them where nothing Americans did was ever bad.
This is what the people who are flexing their white supremacist muscles want to eliminate. They want to whitewash and gloss over their history even as they try to inflict systemic disadvantages on minorities today. This is the people who made up “CRT” and try to confuse the public about what they’re fighting about are doing.
Why is it, do you think, that the people who most oppose teaching an accurate history of the African American experience in the US, and race relations in general, have a pretty strong overlap with white supremacists? Is it some big cosmic coincidence? Why do you think the people who want to try to keep our kids from learning about Jim Crow and segregation are the people who would’ve been the biggest supporters behind those policies?
If your point is simply that right-wing politics in the US relies upon getting people outraged about imagined threats and misinformation, then I’m pretty sure you’re preaching to the choir.
OTOH the rhetorical trick that you seem to have employed, of pretending to be a person who actually believe this nonsense, appears to have caused confusion.
I’m not sure I agree with you as to the motivations of the people who wrote the Democratic Party platform. I think they were more concerned about the 2020 political environment, and realpolitik factors meant that the Democratic Party had to engage its left-wing, and did so in spite of the fact that they were making the platform unattractive to centrists. I don’t think the future of the Democratic Party was a serious consideration.
Having said that, you’ve provided an excellent rebuttal to my argument that the “LGBTQ+” term usage was nothing more than pandering to the Democratic Party’s left-wing. Your counterargument is definitely worth thinking about. Well done.
I’m not actually arguing against gay rights. I could make an argument that US political centrists wouldn’t support queer rights, but that’s a pointless argument since the Democratic Party isn’t advocating explicitly for “queer rights”. As stated above I think that putting the terms “LGBTQ+” into the Democratic Party platform was a way of kowtowing to the Democratic Party’s left wing. I view “Q+” rights as a sliver issue for most Americans, and something that’s really only cared about by the liberal hard-left. Dr.Drake makes a good point that the use of the term might be to appeal to a disengaged liberal youth, rather than committed leftists. On the other hand, I doubt that many disengaged voters are reading the Democratic Party platform, or paying attention to politicians on such a sliver issue.
The people under said label are the ones who created the labels. You claim to not dislike them but you ridicule their own terminology because the party you hate fights for their rights. Your bias blinds you to simple, obvious facts just because you cannot bring yourself to see Democrats or the left as anything other then pure evil because that is what you’ve been told for decades. You have one of those people in this very thread trying, very patiently I might add, to educate you on these matters. Why can’t you just listen?
I grew up in Detroit in the '60s. What we always heard was, “What do you people want us to call you, anyway – Black ? Colored ? Afro-American ? African-American ? Negro ? I can’t keep track.”
What’s old is (always) new again.
It would be simpler if this cohort would say:
- It’s easier for me to attack the nomenclature than to admit I simply don’t support you having equal rights, and
- I’m so damned cognitively challenged that the nomenclature alone gives me a headache. Please don’t ask me to confront substantive issues.
None of this is really that complicated – not the equality being sought, not the nomenclature.
I’ve long said – more or less related – that human sexuality isn’t inherently simple; social conservatives, OTOH, generally are.
What is with this insistence on claiming that Democrats are nothing more than opportunistic liars that have no actual principles regarding gay rights and they just claim to because they want to placate the “liberal hard-left”? You do understand that gay people have parents, siblings, friends, colleagues that all want their friend or family member to have the same access to the rights we all take for granted? Did you also know that you don’t have to have a personal relationship with a gay person to care about their rights? It is so offensive to be told that I don’t care and only pander to these people. Democrats are not just Nancy Pelosi and AOC. There are many millions of us all over the country and your smears of all of us are pretty beyond the pale IMHO.
I’m getting heated so I’m going to step away again so this doesn’t get off track.
Again, it is like if Biden did not win in 2020, with a lot of that platform as a reason for his victory.
You are absolutely right! Thank Gawd no one* is actually telling grade school and high school kids that they are inherently racist because they were born white.
- Yeah, I’m sure there’s someone out there spouting this, but it certainly ain’t the mainstream educational model in the US; it’s the strawman that the racists are using to whitewash American history.
Thanks for trying - he’s been told again and again and again that his statement here is simply a strawman created by those who want to re-write American history.
By now, he knows this. He knows that schools are NOT teaching Critical Race Theory. He knows that they are NOT telling children that they are inherently racist because they were born white.
He knows that this has been made up by those who see the white race as superior, and don’t want anything taught that interferes with this notion. But his fingers are firmly in his ears, and he’s saying lalalalalala.
Expectations always appear to be higher for Democrats. The current media climate is pretty solid in portraying current failures to pass legislation as a failure of Democrats. When the reality is that 52 Senators, representing about 35% of the country (nice system we have here), block every move forward and won’t even discuss compromise.
It is pretty telling that Sununu is unlikely to run for the Senate because his requests for policy stances are usually met with blank expressions. I suspect that Larry Hogan may decline a run for the Senate for partly the same reasons.
… are you under the impression that there’s a difference between “queer” rights and “LGBT” rights?
I’d like to but, unfortunately, I can’t. History is replete with examples of democracies just giving away their freedom. Rome and Germany are the biggest examples I can think of. I fear that we are well on the way of doing just that.
…CRT IS NOT TAUGHT TO HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS.
The Republicans are simply pretending CRT is being taught at High Schools.
It isn’t true. They are lying. They are lying liars. They made it up. They just said it out loud, over and over and over and over and over and over and over again until people started believing it.
And based on most of your posts here I’m almost convinced that you believe that CRT is being taught to High School students. You don’t believe that…right? You know it’s all fake?
We even know the person who started it all. We even have a timeline. September 2nd, 2019. Rufo appeared on Tucker Carlson. Spoke for three minutes. The next day, he got a phone call from the President’s Chief of Staff. And it went from there.
They are winning because they are convincing liars, because outrage is easier to sell than facts, and that many, MANY people want to believe. Propaganda works. It has always worked, it is working now.
They are winning because…their tactics are easy. Three minutes. Three minutes on live television was all it took to start the ball rolling. It wasn’t taken seriously by “the left” at the time because of how un-serious it was. They were obvious lies: who would believe them? By the time most realised what was going on it was too late. The narrative had shifted. The so-called mainstream press were using the CRT framing which made truth and fiction harder to tell apart. The BBC article you cited is an exemplar of this. It “both-sided” an issue that doesn’t have two sides.