Scott Lemieux pulls together a number of threads in a surprisingly brief but pithy post:
So McCain's (nominal) opposition to torture is a good reason to be worried about his tendency. And in these policy preferences, as far as I can tell, Dobson is hardly an outlier. The mean and median GOP voter and public official seems to believe (or at least are not strongly oppose) the ideas that 1)the president should be able to torture people at his whim irrespective of any statutes or treaties, and 2)morality requires that the United States Constitution explicitly make gays and lesbians second-class citizens. The fact that so many people share these views is the real problem here.
Oddly enough, Robert Farley came up with a related idea in this post:
Standing on the corner of Mission and 16th, you can really understand why Bill O'Reilly and his ilk HATE San Francisco; it represents a challenge to their entire vision of what America is and ought to be. Part of it is the politics, yes, but the culture is more; it's about being able to hear half a dozen different languages at one time and see people from, literally, everywhere.
For O'Reilly, San Francisco represents a rejection of America, which is to say a rejection of the set of imaginary traditions that social conservatives hold dear.
This actually turns back on the debate on marriage taking place at Box Turtle Bulletin: the idea that conservatives hold an imaginary vision of America that 1) doesn't match the reality at all, and 2) repels most Americans. (I hope.) A key point from Patrick Campbell's latest rebuttal:
In addition, Stanton demonstrates ethnocentrism by requiring that marriage be defined on his terms: if a society recognizes same-sex marriages as equal to opposite-sex ones, he dismisses them because they do not match his definition of marriage.
That pinpoints one of the key issues here: Stanton, like Dobson, like Bush, like O'Reilly, demonstrates complete ethnocentrism in regard to questions of culture. The flaw is that their "culture" is one that has never existed -- it's the one they're trying to impose on the rest of us. Thus Farley can note that O'Reilly hates San Francisco -- a city that has its own history and path of development, an organic entity that admits of no ideology except what we can surmise from its reality -- because it doesn't fit the idea of what an American city is that he wants to impose on it.
For Dobson, "conservatism" is all about marginalizing gays and lesbians. I maintain reservations about Dobson's integrity, as you will have realized long since, but the idea that he would actually demand the dismisal of an evangelical minister who called for increased attention to the plight of the poor and stewardship of Creation because those issues would take resources away from the "real fight" says to me that he is either insane, in a clinical sense -- a real phobia marked by an obsessive fixation on that idea -- or he is a cynical asshole who's found a cash cow and is afraid of losing his clout. Needless to say, I think the latter analysis seems to be best supported by the evidence.
If you want to know how John Yoo's idea of unlimited presidential power ties in, simply consider that an integral part of the "conservative" mindset, something which is firmly based in hierarchical religion, is an overriding respect for authority -- Jehovah, the pope, the president: they are not to be questioned. America, of course, has always been a country in which authority is regarded with suspicion.
So you begin to see what a radical idea of America contemporary conservatives are trying to foist off on us: authoritarian, restrictive, incurious, repressive. I wonder how long it's going to be before we even stop paying lip service to the Constitution.
5 comments:
And of course O'Reilly's objections to San Francisco as a place where -gasp- immigrants settle is the ultimate expression of NIMBYism coming from someone whose own forebears were feared, reviled and ostracized (remember "NINA" signs from your history books, Bill?) when they first arrived on these shores in large numbers. But, as with so many others of neo-con persuasion, he's got his, now, so no one else gets any.
If O'Reilly's down on immigrants in San Francisco, he'd never manage Chicago. I can rid the el downtown and in twenty minutes on any given day hear conversations in any one or more of Spanish, Vietnamese, Polish, Ukrainian, Chinese, Japanese, and probably Hindi, maybe even Farsi -- and these aren't tourists. These are people who live and work on the north side of Chicago. The tourists tend to stay downtown.
As for the "I've got mine" syndrome, have you looked at the black community's record on gay issues? As in, when did they trademark the phrase "civil rights"?
I suspect it's an element in more than the conservative sectors of the country, but it's the conservatives who've made racism an important element of their tactics and their ideology. I don't think you'll find many members of the Minutemen voting Democratic.
Oddly enough -- or not, if you subscribe to the idea of synchronicity as permeating the universe -- I ran across this post at Citizen Crain, with this quote from Howard Dean:
Dean said some “influential individuals” within the DNC Black Caucus, such as Donna Brazile, opposed the plan because it was seen as “an affront to the civil rights movement.”
Brazile, who chairs the DNC’s Voting Rights Institute, declined to comment for this article.
Dean said the dispute grew to the point where “we had two very important groups of people in the DNC disagreeing with each other” and several DNC and caucus officials were asked to broker a deal that would make peace on the issue.
“I wanted equal representation for gay and lesbian Americans,” he said, “and I wanted to achieve it in a way that wasn’t offensive to the history of the civil rights movement.”
First, that Dean can even make such a statement without being slapped down by everyone who hears it is pathetic. Second, those who consider equality for gays and lesbians an "affront to the civil rights movement" should take a hike -- join the Republican party and remember what being a second-class citizen is really like.
And I'm going to stop here before I wind up with a post in the comments.
But of course you're right, and it's the same sort of discussion I find myself having to have with my Black friends and neighbors all too frequently. It rises, for most of them, partly from their evangelical view of homosex as sinful and partly from their unwillingness to admit that being gay is as much a condition of my existence as being Black is of theirs: they didn't "choose" Black and I didn't "choose" gay.
It's another result of the word games from the Dobson Gang: yes, we can choose not to act on our homosexual attractions, as blacks cannot choose not to act on the color of their skin (and how many have "passed" over the years?), the difference being that our innate difference manifests in behavior, not in physical appearance. It's the kind of thinking that can lead Ted Haggard to say with a straight face "I'm not gay," and by all real measures, he's not -- he does not have the identity, he does not participate in the culture, he just has "sinful urges." By his own definition, he is not gay, he's merely homosexual. This argument is a load of crap, as we all know, but it seems to have some sort of resonance with those to are inclined to disapprove of us anyway. The fact that the behaviors involved are part of our essential nature has no bearing.
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