Voting against Martin Luther King Day is hardly indicative of racism (it’s Cheney’s anyway). You can hardly name a day for every famous person. And going against the flow when the cause is so “noble” might be interpreted as suggesting a certain courage.
Do you really believe that every person who maintains the position that a fetus is life (or potential life and therefore ought not to be destroyed) is sexist?
Do you really believe that every person who maintains the position that people should be hired/promoted solely on the basis of merit and not race is racist?
Zev Steinhardt
Actually, the way I’ve heard the chant is “Racist, sexist, anti-gay! All you bigots go away!” I’ve heard it and read it in media coverage of various protests. I don’t remember the exact context, but I’ve a vague notion that it may have been used at pro-choice rallies and directed at the religious right.
I won’t deal with the charge of racism much; I don’t have the skill to do so. I do know it’s been pointed out that “the most segregated hour of the week is 10:00 am Sunday morning” which was used to draw attention that people of different races have historically worshipped at different churches. The Bible was also used to justify opposition to interracial marriages, just as it’s being used to justify opposition to homosexual marriages.
The charge of sexism is something I can understand a bit more. In addition to opposition to abortion, sometimes even when the life of the mother is in danger, many conservative Christians, including my own bishop, oppose the ordination of women. There are also churches which believe women should be subordinate to men and which do make it clear that’s what they believe. Being a feminist myself, I do hold the belief that if one does not support full equality for women as a whole, then yes, one is sexist. I am planning on starting a Pit or GD thread on this topic one of these days.
As for “anti-gay”, if that’s not covered, I suspect it will be!
I don’t think the Bush administration or Bush himself is racist or sexist. I do think he has little or no understanding of what it is to be working class or poor, but that’s a different chant. I’m also remembering that I’ve seen enough political threads that maybe I shouldn’t have stuck my nose in this one!
CJ
Certainly. Don’t you?
Not at all. I oppose race-based affirmative action myself. (See my many, many posts on Michael Lind’s proposal for replacing race-based affirmative action with color-blind class-based affirmative action.) But it is a safe way to bet. Most white people who oppose affirmative action are racists if you scratch them.
Are you pulling my leg and I’m being too dense to notice it, or do you really believe that a person’s belief that a fetus/child before birth is considered life and ought not to be terminated willy-nilly makes a person sexist? Because if it’s the latter, you condemned a large group of people (myself included) as sexist when, to tell the truth, that is not the case at all.
Zev Steinhardt
My contention is that believing that the fetus’ life, whatever value it may have, is more important than the woman’s right to control her own body does, willy-nilly, make you sexist. You might treat women with respect otherwise, but this is a dealbreaker.
(At the risk of speaking for someone else) No, it does not make him sexist. He’d still feel the same way if men could be pregnant.
Well, if I were to hold the same position for men (assuming, for the moment, that men could become pregnant), then it’s not a sexist position anymore.
In any event, I suppose it boils down to how far do we recognize “rights” of unborn children and do we actually grant absolute control of a person’s body to themselves.
There’s been one scenario that I’ve used before (and will use now) to test the “absolute control of one’s body” aspect of this question. The scenario is:
I presume that you would allow a person to commit suicide (assuming competency, of course) under the “right to control one’s own body” argument. But what if we were dealing with cojoined twins. Would you allow one to commit suicide, even though it would cause the death of the other (in essence making it a murder-suicide)? If you say yes, that you would allow it, then we simply have to agree to disagree.
If you say no, OTOH, then you would agree that a person does not always have complete control over their own body when another person is dependant on for life. Of course, then we’re still stuck with the question of whether or not a fetus/unborn child should have the “rights” that we grant to human beings (which is a large part of the abortion debate to begin with).
And to return to the issue of sexism, let me add this: I have religious beliefs that tell me that a person’s body is not thier own. It’s on loan from God and must be treated with respect and not mutilated/tattooed, etc. One item in particular is castration - it’s against Jewish law for a man to be castrated (which, like abortion, only applies to one gender). Considering that I don’t believe that either men or women have complete control over thier bodies, does that still make me sexist for my belief, or am I now anti-male as well as anti-female?
Zev Steinhardt
I think cmkeller and others are correct. “Racist” has morphed into a generic term of abuse meaning “anyone on the Right who I don’t like”. BrainGlutton appears to be attempting the same process on the term “sexist”.
Like most political chants, it is simply duckspeak from the bellyfeelers.
Regards,
Shodan
Bush refuses to support the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. As governor of Texas, Bush refused to adopt a state administration non-discrimination policy that included sexual orientation. George W. Bush opposes gay and lesbian Americans to serve openly in the military. Bush also has stated that he would not appoint anyone as a Joint Chief of Staff who openly advocated allowing gays and lesbians in the armed forces.
In the immortal words of George Carlin -
“They are not pro-life… They are anti-woman!”
I am as staunchly pro-choice as they come, absolutely firmly, 100% on your side of the fence on that issue, and even I am having difficulty believing you’re serious about this.
If a person legitimately, honestly believes a fetus is a human being, advocating its rights as a person would seem to me to be a reasonable position irrespective of the fact that only women get pregnant.
It is certainly possible that SOME people are pro-choice because they just don’t like women. It is my direct experience, however, that most people who are anti-abortion are anti-abortion because they think fetuses are human beings whose lives should be preserved at all costs. I simply do not believe that a definition of “sexism” that essentially means “women can do whatever they want, including murdering people” is a reasonable definition, but that’s literally what you’re saying.
I could be wrong, but I read the OP as having been proffered in good faith with an open mind – that he’s no Bush supporter but that he’s willing to be persuaded that his roommates’ proposition that Bush is not sexist or racist is correct.
To respond to the OP, Hi, you have to understand that loony left protestors are very, very stupid – equally as stupid as loony right protestors. That’s how they fall in with North-Korean-funded Trotskyites in the first place. They have an extremely limited vocabulary of chants which they have to recycle constantly as they have more protests than they have issues or people to protest against. They’ve got “Two, four, six, eight, something something rhymes with ate!”, there’s “What do we want? Something! When do we want it? Now!” , there’s the one you heard and there’s “The people, united, will never be defeated!” (which is especially amusing immediately following an electoral loss, but I digress). That’s pretty much it. So they have to recycle.
That level of stupidity doesn’t allow them to understand such nuances (heh) as the fact that the President’s position on gay marriage is identical to Barbara Boxer’s and that they disagree only whether an amendment to the Constitution is necessary to codify their shared view or that he is the first president in the nation’s history to choose any non-whites for any of the “big four” cabinet positions (and he’s done it three times for two of the positions). Just as you see in this thread, where some people are trying to understand that some people can reasonably hold the view that a human life is created at inception rather than at birth but can’t get over the hump that for a person with such a view there is no functional difference between abortion and infanticide.
This is a standard leftist chant.
In the 1990s Armitage Baptist Church in Chicago was in the forefront of the Operation Rescue anti-abortion movement. While undeniably conservative, the church is also a model of integration: their black and white co-pastors give workshops on racial reconciliation, books have been written about them, etc.
Anyway, at one point there was a rally outside on a night that they were having an anti-abortion prayer vigil, and all night the chant was “racist, sexist, anti-gay” etc. I think Nazi was in there somewhere. The (almost all-white) protestors continued shouting “racist,” even when buses with all-black gospel choirs started rolling in.
I don’t think he’s sexist for speaking the pro-life party line, and I don’t think I’ve seen any cites that said he only nominated pro-life judges to the bench either. Even if he did, it’s not sexist to believe that abortion is wrong if you believe that a fetus is a human being.
He’d be sexist if he thought that women shouldn’t have the choice to abort because they are women, but their gender doesn’t have anything to do with his belief that fetuses are real people.
As for racist, well, I am also opposed to race-based affirmative action especially when it comes to quotas or ‘point systems’ that give someone additional points based on their race. I believe all people should have an equal opportunity to apply for any job they want, and that the position should be awared on the basis of merit and ability.
Being opposed to Affirmative Action doesn’t make one a racist, nor does being opposed to abortion make one a sexist. I’d need to see evidence of specific things he did that would make me believe those two.
As for anti-gay, well, he does oppose much in the way of protecting the same rights for gay people as exist for heterosexual people, and I believe that is wrong of him. What I don’t know is whether he does it out of hatred for gays, or even a desire to keep gays ‘down’. I wish he would change his position on that, though.
What does Barbara Boxer have to do with whether or not Bush is sexist, racist, or anti-gay? Also, just cause Bush nominated non-whites for cabinet positions doesn’t mean he isn’t racist. I don’t get the impression that he is, but his nominations mean nothing in that regard.
It’s funny . . . I honestly have been thinking of starting an IMHO or Cafe Society thread along the lines of “Isn’t George Carlin one of the least funny or insightful jackasses around?”
Is the Carlin quote offered as probative of something having to do with political reality?
I’m holding out until I hear what Gallagher has to say on the issue.
And by the way . . . why do we drive on the parkway but park on the driveway?
You also have to understand that not all the protestors joining in that chant fall under the heading of “loony left.” Some did, no doubt, but some might have been ordinary disappointed Democrats.
The public protest chant is, of course, a very constrained form – it has to be short, repetitive, punchy, and rythmic (in 4-4 march time, usually). You pretty much have to recycle whatever you’ve found that works.
How do you know they don’t understand nuances? The problem is that it is practically impossible to express nuances in a chant – or in any other form of slogan or sound bite, or on a bumper sticker.
I don’t know about that. His daughters hang out with the fashion crowd and he seems to have no problem with that. There was a newspaper story (sorry, can’t find a cite at the moment) in which he and Laura were described as having a number of homosexual friends and GWB was mentioned as having warmly embraced/complimented some ex-classmate who showed up at a reunion after a sex-change operation. And Northeast Establishment Episcopaleans (which is how GWB was raised) have a long history of not being much bothered by homosexuality (perhaps because their single-sex prep schools, like English public schools, tend to encourage a bit of “youthful experimentation?”).
You understand that about half of all fetuses are female, correct? I’m not trying to turn this into an abortion debate. I’m merely pointing out that your syllogism that translates pro-life into anti-female is a little silly. If Bush were to say that he believes fetuses are human beings with the right to live, but only if the fetus is male, then you’d have a point.