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Sunday, June 14, 2009

Out Rage

Eric and I were expecting the beginnings of damage control and walk-back from the recent Obama Administration fuck-ups on lgbtq issues. John Berry has provided what looks to be a preview of coming attractions in this vein. It is, in a word, weak. We are, in a word, outraged. I am literally shaking with rage and upset at this moment. Here's John Aravosis on why. Here's Pam Spalding on why.

Eric has taken our Obama sign off of the front window. It's been there a long time now. I miss it already. I miss the feeling I had that made me want it there.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

As much as I support lgbt issues, and as much as I want the Obama administration to adopt completely gay-friendly policies, there are other--I would argue more important--things that he is doing enormously well on. His treatment thus far of the Middle East has been fantastic, for one example.

There is one simple fact about Obama: he is not Mister Progressive. He's a hell of a lot closer than anyone else we've had in my experience, but he's just not going to be "all that." He's a politician--sometimes he has to pander to the disgusting right wing. But as long as he gets most things right, I don't think it is correct to get all fidgety over one issue when he's doing an unequivocally amazing job on most everything else.

Be proud, like me, that you have a president who is intelligent, can learn from his mistakes, sides with progressives on many issues, and is not some loony toon dumb-as-shit jackass like the last guy.

Things will likely get better. Just give it time, don't get too stressed, and the fucked-up politics of the right will eventually smother their own wrong-headed causes.

Dale Carrico said...

Hi, Anonymous. If you've been reading this blog at all over the last year or so you will know that what you are saying is what I have been saying and so I know what you are saying.

I am certainly not claiming idiotic Obama-Bush equivalency theses, or jumping into third party irrelevancy, or losing track of pragmatic priorities. But Obama didn't have to pander to the right on this, these moves are utterly gratuitous, they lack both legal and pragmatic rationale, they will cost him support without gaining him any, and they require that he repudiate campaign promises without cause and support arguments he has hitherto rightly described as repugnant, and I've already indicated all this already right here, on the blog, today, in fact scarcely minutes ago.

But more than all that, look: I'm gay and I have been fighting for my rights for decades (Marches on Washington, Cracker Barrel sit-ins, jailed for demonstrating, money I didn't have for causes that needed it, teaching queer theory to hundreds of students) so I don't need to be told to "give it time" and, second, I am an actually-existing fully-fledged person and a fully-fledged citizen, right here and right now, and don't need to be told not to be "too stressed" about being treated otherwise.

I don't doubt you are trying to be nice. Please don't. I've got plenty of nice in my life. What I demand is justice at an historical moment when it is conspicuously feasible. Write your representatives and the White House and demand they work to repeal DADT, repeal DOMA, and enact ENDA.

Eric said...

Yeah, yeah, the old 'your second-class citizenship status isn't important right now' line.

The problem is, it is NEVER the 'right time', we always have to 'give it more time'. Never mind that there is broad public support for ENDA and a DADT repeal right now, it isn't the time...the president can't order DADT discharges stopped AND say nice things in Cairo at the same time!

BULLSHIT. And you know it too so you can shove your condescending platitudes up your ass, anonymous.

liz said...

I've been reading your blog pretty regularly since taking your Aesthetics and Politics class last spring, and even more regularly since Obama's inauguration. I started 'losing hope' and feeling a bit silly and duped when I first heard about Pastor Hawaiian T-shirt. But this blog has kept me from becoming too pessimistic, or at least from becoming unhelpfully pessimistic. I’ve been ‘out’ with my parents and friends for nearly four years, during which time I’ve been kicked out of my parents’ home for being gay, told that I wasn’t allowed to seek help from other family members (to avoid “embarrassing” my parents), reminded that homosexuality is on a par with pedophilia, and restricted from spending time with younger siblings (to all of whom I was always like a second mom) for fear of my corrupting them. Then things began to change a little: over the phone early last spring my mom, to my utter shock, told me that her and my dad liked Obama. Until that moment I’d been pulling for Edwards; afterward, I saw Obama as someone with a superior political talent—he could perhaps bring people like my parents out of the darkness into which they had been lured by Republican Christianity. I had a feeling I was being over-hopeful at the time, and I was right: by November my parents had been sold on what FOX News told them to think about Obama. They began to hate him. They spoke with disgust and disdain about their neighbors who had Obama bumper stickers and lawn signs. The problem to me is that Obama does not realize that people like my parents are not people worth catering to: he’s already lost them. They didn’t vote him. They will never like him. They will never vote for him. Yet he won more than definitively. And I’m assuming that this is because people like me, who had never voted and never believed that mainstream politics would or could be progressive, did vote for him. And reminded all of my friends to do so as well. And celebrated and cried and felt truly and unprecedently hopeful when he won. Perhaps needless to say, it infuriates me to no end that he’s ditched people like me in the hope that he might win over people like my parents, who, though I myself through the irrationality of familial affection will continue to hope for it, will NEVER come around. And even if they did, perhaps against their dinglenuthead judgment and solely for the sake of their daughter, they would STILL NEVER go vote for Obama. They are, politically speaking, a lost cause, like many other fathers, mothers, grandfathers, brothers and sisters, etc. etc. And though I could very well be wrong, and perhaps unfairly pessimistic, the direction and stance that the Obama Administration seems set to follow will certainly play no part in whatever it takes to prove me wrong (a “whatever” of which I intend on being a resiliently and irrationally persistent part).