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News Analysis: Nov. 6, 2012, the Second Stonewall
Washington State voters took to the streets to celebrate one of the big wins (Source:AP/Ted Warren)
Since
the discussion on all of the major right wing websites has been that
they’ve finally gotten the memo that religious zealotry has no place in
politics, indulge me in quoting from Jesus Christ: "Blessed are they
that hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled."
Every
year, we march to commemorate the birth of the modern gay rights
movement at the Stonewall Inn in Downtown Manhattan on June 28, 1969.
From now on, we can add another day to the calendar of our greatest
achievements: Nov. 6, 2012.
The 2012 election marked a
180-degree turn in the American electorate. Whereas before we had scored
0-for-30, yesterday we won everywhere.
Yes, I know that we still
have fights on our side. But even the most adamant right wingers have
finally seen that fighting against basic rights for one of the most most
oppressed segments of the population won’t play.
I regularly scour rightwing websites such as Freerepublic, World Net Daily, the National Review and Townhall.
All of them, with the exception of World "Nut" Daily, which is so far
out of the mainstream that it makes the others seem reasonable, are in
unison.
It’s disheartening to see the deafening silence from the
Log Cabin Republicans. (Forget GOProud. They’re small potatoes, a silly
shadow organization completely funded by the gay John Galt, Peter
Thiel.) Unless Log Cabin finally accepts the same reality that the rest
of the GOP is slowly coming to, it will be relegated to even more
marginal status in our movement than it already occupies.
The
reality is that the American people have finally realized that when one
group can be oppressed, everyone can be oppressed. Even those who can’t
stand us are slowly getting the message expressed in "The Federalist
Papers" that you accept the rights of those you can’t stand. Tolerance
means just that: tolerating others. Not loving them or even like them,
but letting them live their lives as long as they don’t interfere in
yours or cause unnecessary pain to anyone.
That’s the basic
message of last night. The mantra on the Right is -- finally -- that the
GOP has got to purge itself of the baggage of the religious fanatics.
Pat Buchanan was right in 1992 when he declared a "cultural war" at the
GOP National Convention. What he didn’t foresee was that his side would
ultimately lose.
Ironically, the big icon of the Right, Ronald
Reagan, is the one who sowed the seeds of destruction in his own party.
In a near-perfect mirror of the paradox that doomed Mitt Romney, Reagan
actually was fairly tolerant when he served as governor of California.
As
outlined in the film "Milk," he gets full credit for the defeat of the
hateful Briggs Amendment, which would have barred LGBT teachers. Yet his
concept of the "big tent" GOP led to the embrace of the then-nascent
religious right, the so-called Moral Majority. By giving lip service to
bigots like Jerry Falwell and outright nut cases like Pat Robertson,
Reagan let the in the true barbarians.
It was ultimately left to Mitt Romney to reap the whirlwind.
The
last GOP president, George W. Bush, openly supported the
separate-but-equal doctrine of civil unions. His vice president,
arch-conservative torch bearer Dick Chaney, tacitly -- and finally
openly, after he left office -- supported gay marriage.
The party
operatives thought they had a winning strategy when they adopted a
radical platform at their convention last summer that opposed any legal
recognition of same-sex unions. They smugly believed that the president
and his party had bought defeat by openly embracing same-sex marriage.
Mitt
Romeny exemplifies the schizophrenia of the party’s plutocrats. In
order to win the governship of Massachusetts, Romney cast himself in the
mold of the "Rockefeller Republicans," the Northeast elite that was
fiscally conservative but socially moderate.
The man who, while
running for Teddy Kennedy’s seat promised Bay State voters that he would
outperform his opponent in promoting gay rights, had to swerve sharply
to the right to win a primary process dominated by the most extreme
factions of his party.
By the time he finally bested his
opponents, he had to give lip service to Rick Santorum’s medieval
concept of morality. He had to ignore the obvious hypocrisy of serial
adulterers Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain. He even had to express
opinions as ridiculous as those of the biggest fruitcake in a clown car
of candidates, Michele Bachmann.
Thus he had to suppress what I
believe are his true leanings, that of small-government pure capitalism,
to cater to the party’s basest base. Like a figure in Greek tragedy, he
was done in by his own overreaching.
So what’s next? Unless I’m
misreading tea leaves, it looks good for passage finally of the too-long
delayed Employment Nondiscrimination Act. I can even see the GOP’s
congressional leaders doing a repeat of the soft front that they
displayed about ending "Don’t Ask Don’t Tell" when repeal of repeal of
the despised Defense of Marriage Act goes to committee.
More
importantly, it’s crucial that our LGBT organizations refocus their
energies on the international scene. Given our rapid progress in the
developed West (and developing; e.g., Argentina, Mexico City, Uruguay,
etc.), it’s all the more obscene that virtually the entire continent of
Africa, every Muslim-dominated nation, much of the Caribbean and the
former Soviet republics are still living the Dark Ages.
We can
bask in our success, but if we forget people who live in constant fear
of their lives merely for being who they are, than we don’t deserve the
gift we’ve been given.
