Southern Poverty Law Center, Family Research Council and the Rhetoric of Hate

Recently the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization with its roots in the civil rights struggles of the African American community published a list of organizations it identified as hate groups. These groups were actually added to an already existing list compiled by the SPLC which was made up of white supremacist organizations like the KKK. Included was the organization the Family Research Council, which has since fired back at the SPLC by saying they are simply representing Christian values and a perspective shared by the majority of Americans. This is in fact patently false.

It is important to recognize the nature of the FRC and its activities. They are known among many mainstream groups as a far-right advocacy organization that specializes in two issues, gay rights and abortion. Not only is the information they put out not widely considered legitimate research, but they are known to in fact be heavily committed and involved in political campaigns. Most recently they partnered with the National Organization for Marriage, who themselves are widely recognized for their far-right political views, in committing a virulent and riotously bigoted campaign to vote out of office the three justices of the Iowa Supreme Court who were up for election this past November. Those justices included the chief justice and were part of a unanimous decision by the nine judge panel that LGBT citizens in Iowa were constitutionally endowed with the right to marriage. They have since been very public about their intentions to continue their crusade in the next election cycle until all of the justices who participated in that decision are removed from office. I say committed a campaign because the campaign against these three justices was not only fraught with the use of the most virulent and bigoted rhetoric against members of the LGBT community, but it also included outright harassment of those justices by members of their organizations, which were summarily recorded on video and circulated on the internet.

While the rhetoric of the FRC is presented as 'research' which has been somehow independently vetted and verified, it is nothing but that, rhetoric. This far-right organization does their best to present a public face of reasonableness and rationality in the media, however it only takes a cursory investigation to see the depth of bigotry ingrained in their message. All of this is while representing themselves as tolerant Christians who are not anti-gay, but merely seeking to protect the welfare of children and society through the institution of marriage.

The research and statements of this organization are actually categorically false and the list of organizations or news outlets who present them as even remotely possible is short and telling. Recently FOX News interviewed Tony Perkins, the president of the organization, in response to the SPLC's labeling of them as a hate group and he firmly declares that organization as a far-left fringe group desperately trying to hold on to being relevant when their leftist platform of promoting a homosexual agenda is losing soundly, as represented in the last election, he alleges. Not only is this not true, but it presenting a lie as fact to a large portion of the public who watch FOX News and consider it a legitimate news organization.

The Facts:

According to a 2009 USA Today/Gallup poll, while the majority of Americans are opposed to gay marriage, those numbers swing dramatically when you consider how they break down, with 60% of people under the age of 30 thinking gay marriages should be legally recognized and have the same rights and status as heterosexual marriage. The majority of self-identified liberals and moderates support gay marriage, with only self-identified conservatives representing an overwhelming majority against gay marriage.

While the country remains split pretty evenly on the issue of gay-marriage, recent polls show that the majority of Americans do believe that there should be some sort of legal recognition for same-sex couples, including legal rights and protections similar or equal to those of heterosexuals. It is interesting, however, to note that while those polls are pretty evenly split in general, Republicans and self-identified conservatives still strongly oppose gay marriage.

The country, though, isn't evenly split over the issues of LGBT people serving openly in the military. That same page on PollingReport.com shows that the majority, ranging from two-thirds to three-fourths, of Americans believe gay people should be able to serve openly and would vote for open service if it was on a ballot.

So, when the FRC represents themselves as being in step with even a large number of Americans, they are either lying, or they are really referring only to self-identified conservatives. Even among those conservatives, or among Republicans, polled there isn't a unanimous consensus. This is the same fallacy touted by pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and even Bill O'Rielly. These people state as fact that the 'liberals', or according to O'Reilly the 'leftist pinheads', are losing this imaginary culture war they have concocted over the years. To them it is just an easily recognizable truth that their political ideology is the majority opinion, which means that they have the right to impose it on all of us by encoding it into law, and that somehow because they believe they are a part of the majority that that somehow makes them right and that the reasoning behind those opinions are factual and moral truth.

Here is the truth: In another ten to twenty years same-sex marriage will be a reality in this country. In fact if the court case against Prop 8 continues on to the US Supreme Court and is successful there, which is the inevitable ruling if it is ruled on its merits, then gay marriage will be a reality in this country far sooner. As far as I know, the striking down of a state constitutional amendment, which Prop 8 was, by the SCOTUS would then overturn all of the laws, statutes, and constitutional amendments set in to law across this country. While this may create an outcry among people for a host of reasons and would, of course, be labeled as legislating from the bench or judicial advocacy by the right-wing, and then likely thought of as that by much of the rest of the country, within a short period of time it would become a non-issue, as it has in MA. In that state, despite all of the anti-gay energy poured in, the constitutional amendment did not make it through the legislative process in time to stop marriage licenses from being issued and then has subsequently, since 2004, not been a serious ballot issue. Once the majority of Americans see how much of a non-issue gay marriage will be in their daily lives, how it will in fact not significantly impact their freedom of religion or the operations of their churches, and how it won't lead to the indoctrination of their children by public schools, all of the uproar will go away and any continued opposition will be relegated to the far-right fringe, as has opposition to legalized abortion.

In conclusion, there is a reason that the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled the Family Research Council, among other anti-gay organizations, as a hate-group. Despite the exterior it likes to present of a moderate Christian organization devoted to researching issues related to families and its positions and research suggesting that civil rights for gay people somehow negatively impacts society, it is actually a far-right organization who are motivated by continuing to impose their religious doctrine on our political process. One need not look past the rhetoric used in their campaigns, in their literature, and its political affiliations to see that. They raise money for the purpose of affecting public policy through political campaigns and do so with rhetoric that the majority of Americans, as evidenced by legitimate polling data, disagree with, and I would assert would be disgusted by. For any news organization to represent them as anything but a conservative, if not arch-conservative far-right, political organization is both a lie and an injustice to the majority of Americans. An organization that presents them as a reasonable and rational contributor to our political process and its discourse truly identifies that organization, or news channel, as part of or pandering to that far-right fringe.

If We Don't Have Science, What Do We Have

The Republican representatives up for chairmanship of the energy committee, as far as I know the only large committee dealing directly with environmental protection and climate change on a regular basis, are of course all global warming deniers. That's not a shock when all the new incoming representatives are deniers. These senior representatives, however, are in a place to drastically affect all policy regarding protection of the environment and energy policy and that should be disturbing to most Americans. At least one of them has said that if he gets the chairmanship he is going to have extensive hearings into 'climategate', the fake controversy over some snarky comments made by a climate scientist via emails, a controversy dug up and fabricated by the conservative media universe and especially FOX. They are determined to have hearings exposing, essentially, the fraud of global climate change.

This poses a serious risk to all of us, to our way of life and to the long-term health and national security of this nation. One key area of impact, for example, is the way Congress deals with and supports renewable energy. It will not be long before most developed nations will have cut their use of fossil fuels to where their needs will be satisfied by domestic production because of their development of renewable resources and green technology. In that scenario, we will be in major competition with nations in the processing of developing for those resources and will have become irrelevant in the global debate over the industrial and technological production of green solutions and environmental protection. Moreover it indicates to me a shocking disregard for the future welfare of our children, something that has at least rhetorically been so important to conservatives.

Overall, though, this indicates a disturbing and dangerous disregard and disdain for science and scientific reasoning. This goes along in some ways with my previous post regarding the demonization of education and the educated. It is a major problem for us as a nation if we decide that a major branch of science, one of the central branches in fact, which is Biology and the environmental sciences that arise from it, is irrelevant and inconclusive. There are in fact few credible scientists who disagree with the basic statement that man-made greenhouse gasses are at least partly responsible for the phenomena called climate change as an effect of global warming. The assertion of those on the conservative side of politics and especially the media have made the argument that many credible scientists who would argue with the science of global warming don't do so publicly for political reasons and because of the pressure they're under from the leftist green movement. Really?

Now, it baffles me why science as related to weapons and energy development is trustworthy to politicians yet the similar types of reasoning when applied to global warming is not. If nuclear technology and science is credible and rock solid science, why aren't the principles of thermodynamics as related to geophysics and climatology? In a similar way, why is the field of genetics, especially in relation to the work being done to cure cancer and treat diseases like Alzheimer's, so inarguable yet evolution, the basis and instigator for the study of genetics, is not?

All we have in terms of the ability to observe, measure and interact with the world around us, including the environment, is based on similar principles of scientific reasoning and analysis. They are based on the principles of skepticism and a desire to find empirical data and facts to support hypothesis and theory. If we cannot rely on these principles and the outcomes from them, than we are lost and America will never again be the scientific and technological leader we once were. If we cannot pursue policy that even our most scientifically ignorant president in recent memory, George W Bush, has come to believe is important, policy that is based on scientific knowledge agreed upon by 151 other nations who signed the Kyoto Protocols back in the 1990's, that we are doomed to diminish and eventually become a wasteland of pollution and ignorance.

Surviving Republican

Dear Republican Party:


You have won back the House of Representatives in an election year rife with unrest over the economy and jobs. To do so, however, you activated the farthest reaches of the right wing electorate and by doing so gave legitimacy to a kind of crass disregard for truth and facts that is outright dangerous for this countries future. Even more than that you have given legitimacy to candidates and a movement that actively spurn the value of education and being or becoming educated. You have demonized and marginalized large groups of minority voters, minorities who statistically are fast growing parts of the electorate. All of this in the name of politics.

It would be unwise, however, to believe the rhetoric of your recent victory speeches in saying that this was a referendum on the overall policies or agenda of President Obama. You should also not think that it is somehow a show of support for your own party agenda. While it is politically expedient to posture in front of the media, polls say that more of this country supports the Democratic Party than they do your party, that most people like the individual policies of the president and the Democrats more. What you should take this election as a referendum on is job creation. Tax cuts are nice, and they are important, but without putting people back to work, it doesn't matter to them what their tax rates are. They want a job or want to not fear over keeping their job.

Another mistake would be to waste time talking about 'Obamacare'. If the Democrats had done an effective job selling the message of the legislation to the American people from the beginning, you would never have gained the upper hand in the media. Much of what the bill does is supported by the American people. Of those who do not support the overall legislation there is a significant number who think it did not go far enough. It would be dangerous for your party to mistake the slogans and spin of Rush Limbaugh and FOX News as fact or as the prevailing sentiment of most of the country.

What is also a mistake is not to listen to moderates like Rudy Giuliani. It is time for your party to stop allowing candidates to run racially divisive campaigns. It is time for you to ease up on the social agenda that has dehumanized and degraded gays and lesbians. You have already lost the culture war on those issues. The country is becoming more diverse rather than less and more accepting of LGBT people and their civil rights. You will loose this part of the debate and history is already attesting to that. As Meghan McCain says, if you want to be relevant as a party in the future you have to not alienate massive portions of the electorate in the minority and young voters in order to guarantee the vote of a proportionally smaller group of white heterosexual Christian voters.

So what's the solution? For now, concentrate on the message of fiscal conservatism that was supposedly the hallmark of the Tea Party. If you think you can balance the budget and get the economy going again with conservative policies, do it. Set aside the social agenda many of the arch-conservatives in your party are proposing and really just concentrate on budgets. One of the other things that was consistently of concern to voters was the gridlock in Washington, which means the stalling and partisanship. You cannot complain about partisanship and point fingers if you have an opportunity for true compromise.

Does that give you cover with the Tea Party? For many it would, as fiscal issues is a #1 topic on everyone's mind. What will be more problematic, however, getting nothing done except trying to make Obama a one term president or getting something done that you can actually run on as an accomplishment? The choice is yours, but 2012 is not going to be all about tearing down the Obama agenda and administration, nor will it be all about the Tea Party, which prevails in a midterm but can't hope to rally the entire party for a presidential election. But either way, don't choose the few, choose the many, choose all of us.

Why did I go into $110K in debt for an education?

There is an issue in this country with education. I'm not talking about education with a capitol 'E' as in the Dept. of Education, or even the problems facing our schools or us fixing the system and become a leader in the world in terms of education. I'm talking about a basic belief that has come through clearly in this election that education is evil. While we say education is key to the future, we tell our children that if you want to be successful and happy you need an education, if you want to climb out of poverty or have options for a career you have to get an education. Everything about our individual and societal future depends on education.

So what's the problem? The problem is that because of disparate groups in this country galvanizing in the 1990's around the Republican Party, because they felt validated by the election of a president who did everything he could to endear himself to the American people by pretending he wasn't one of the wealthiest presidents from one of the most privileged backgrounds in our history, and lately by the Tea Party and their attacks on Barack Obama. Thanks to Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Christine O'Donnell and Sharon Angles, we now have a social and political narrative that tells us that if you are educated, if you are intellectually above average and successful because you are talented and innovative and intelligent, and if you have any inkling about the makeup of Congress, current events or READ, than you are elitist. Not only are you elitist, but you are out of touch with the rest of the country and unfit to lead in any legislative or executive office anywhere in the country. Because Sarah Palin couldn't name a single newspaper or magazine off the top of her head in the Katie Couric interview in 2008, because she couldn't handle questions from any news outlet except FOX News and the conservative media, everyone but those friendly stations became the 'Lame Stream Media'. Thanks to those and others, disseminated through the media exposure and organizing of the Tea Party movement over the past several years, being a person with an education in this country makes you of less value.

Now, it has been true for a long time that intellectuals are often targets for totalitarian regimes, for fascist societies and political movements. Intellectuals think about things, and argue things and talk to other people about things. When intellectuals then disagree with a movement or regime they have to be silenced lest they foster unrest that erodes that regime or movement's power base. If that regime or movement is overtly and ideologically oppressing their people or if they are enforcing policies that have a broad reaching negative impact, more and more intellectuals speak out against that movement or regime. That is what we have here and it gets more and more insidious.

One topic that floats out among social conservatives in this country, and it floats around on all levels of government, is about the administration of our public schools. A central aspect, philosophically, to this topic is the issue of teaching 'Intelligent Design', which in reality is another word for creationism, the teaching of biology through the Biblical narrative of God creating the Earth and universe and all things and all creatures. This has been a point of contention over and over again in local and state school boards with parents advocating its teaching in place of evolution, or at the very least as a 'viable' alternative to evolution. At the national level, one of the areas of the budget most Republicans are willing to cut, or at least they say this as they're campaigning, is the Education budget. Sharon Angles and a number of other fringe candidates even want to dismantle the Department of Education. Christine O'Donnell mentioned, in reference to teaching ID (creationism) in public schools, that all those curriculum decisions should be made on the local level, that everything should be on the local level.

There aren't general education standards in this country, despite all the testing to grade schools and districts on their proficiency rates. There are, however, standardized tests required by colleges and universities. Why? Because they want to see that a student is able to handle the academic requirements, that they are a desirable candidate for their school, and that they have long-term potential to become successful in the world, thereby reflecting well on their alma mater and donating money as an alum. Whether or not this is a major hurdle for students in this country based on race and socioeconomic status, it would only become that much harder when there is no nationally funded government agency to help support the administrative infrastructure for testing. It would only become that much harder by removing even the appearance of some national standard of education and putting curriculum on the local level.

Of course conservatives want the curriculum decisions to be placed on the local level. They want religious to conservatives to have more control over their kids' education, they want to have more control over the 'moral' or 'social' issues brought up in the schools. Evolution then wouldn't be the only thing for the chopping block. Another perennial issue is 'sex education', or what the rest of us know as health class. Effectively they probably would be most comfortable to return education in this country, and some have said this explicitly, to that of the 1950's. All of that is representative of the incredibly romanticized version of that period in history that many in this country believes in. They may want this for many reasons, too many for me to speculate, but the effect would be to indoctrinate all of our children in a worldview that isn't even recognizable to our modern world. It would ignore the empirical evidence of climate change and the effects of industrialization on the environment, convince children that industries have our best interests at heart as they cut costs to produce food more cheaply, all while promoting the idea that America is the greatest country in the world to the exclusion of everyone else, not just that we can but that we have the right to take unilateral action in the pursuit of our own perceived national interests.

Not incomprehensible is the connection between these conservative ideas of 'local' control and the religious fundamentalism that has become pervasive throughout the Republican Party. It has allowed people of generally less political knowledge, awareness on current events, and general education to congregate around some very well funded party leaders masquerading as outsiders. The rhetorical device of 'educated elite', especially representing them as all from New England, sits really well with working and lower class voters in other parts of the country, and especially in rural areas. These voters then were duped into trusting candidates whose own funding can be traced directly to insider political action groups and often directly to enormously wealthy individuals and corporations. Their own lack of political knowledge and savvy let them vote against their own interests in candidates who we are now seeing turn against some of their own campaign messages and a party interested in nothing but obstruction and further economic problems. At odds with this are the many labor unions who activated their traditionally Democratic base and supported Democratic candidates with money and people-power. These unions recognize the connections between corporate interests and financial groups and the deeply held principles of the Republican Party's conservative agenda antagonistic to the working class.

Where does that leave us as a country? Well, on climate change for instance, 151 nations signed the Kyoto Protocols back in the late 1990's. President Clinton abstained, as did India and China, because it called for a large reduction in fossil fuel emissions. That means that 151 nations, including all of the industrialized nations we call allies and who have historically stable economies and governments, recognize the threat of global climate change resulting from global warming and its involvement in destroying ecosystems and the environment. With every new Republican member of Congress stating during their campaigns they do not believe in global warming, and with several of them looking to hold public high profile hearings to prosecute the 'hoax' of global warming, how can we even think about being competitive in any meaningful way. When evolution, a central principle to all of science, the cornerstone of the field of Biology and it's resulting disciplines, and to the field of genetics so crucial to the fight of diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's, how can we expect to progress in any of the sciences when it is not just questioned by our politicians, but policies put in place that discourage it from being included in classrooms and promoting religiously inspired doctrine instead?

Something that gives me hope, and something that has always made the socially conservative politicians in this country call academia 'liberal', is that in universities and colleges, you are required to prove your points by citing sources, defending sources, defending theories and hypothesis and the process you used to develop those from the evidence you collected. In science, for instance, you are required to present all of your evidence and facts in a structured way and cite any sources. If there is anything faulty in your research methodology, in the quality of the sources or in the logic in whatever argument you're making, your professor gives you a lower grade, talks with you about how you went about your work, or helps to correct errors to strengthen your work. Other fields of study follow similar methods, they call it critical thinking, and it requires you to think beyond just the words on a page, to develop connections and ideas with other material or sources you've read or encountered, and to argue your point in a clear and convincing way. We all have to go through this when we go through a college or university education. We all may not be at a school with the same level of academic intensity, not all of us are able to compete at the same academic level or are interested in pursuing a very academic career path or studies, but we are all challenged to learn and think beyond the superficial.

That is what really is at the heart of the whole idea of 'educated elite', which then translates to 'liberal elite', or if it's about a schism between Sarah Palin and the real Republican Party, the 'establishment elite' or 'Washington elite'. Somehow it's always about 'elite', and how the 'elite' is bad. Well, when you are dealing with multinational corporations, with international trade or political policy, when you are dealing with micro- and macroeconomic issues, with stabilizing and incredibly diverse economy and understanding the intricacies of a multicultural and multilateral approach to prosecuting a war, instead of just sending planes to bomb the hell of out whomever, don't you want the elite? Doesn't 'elite' mean the best, the highest order of whatever it's being applied to?

Of course some random housewife with a mediocre education and no policy background will never be considered to be qualified to become president. Running the nation isn't anything like running a household, despite whatever she might say. Stabilizing the world's largest economy during major global economic uncertainty is nothing like balancing a family checkbook or paying household bills. No, 'common sense' solutions have absolutely no place in Washington, D.C. because that's where we want the smartest, brightest, most talented people in the fields of economics, political science, law and international trade to be and to be working. Sarah Palin is a million miles from any of that. And if an ignorant housewife with no business experience and who has no political skills at all other than being an agitator within her own party can become president, then what the hell did I take on $110K in student loan debt for?

Anti-Gay = Homophobia = Bigot

This is a little addendum to my last post. Most people get uncomfortable when someone throws around the term 'racist'. Of course when we think of racists we think of white power groups and the KKK. There are institutionalized forms of racism as well, sometimes institutionalized to the point where we commonly accept some things that truly discriminate against ethnic and racial minorities.

Imagine, then, how those same people react when we throw around the term 'homophobia'. Because there is material in the Bible and because many religious institutions have taken public positions on the subject of homosexuality, there seems to be some defense for those who are homophobic to act out on that belief or feeling. Many of those same religious excuses, though, were and still are used by white supremacy groups or by politicians who sought to activate voters by playing on the fears of black people taught by society to white people from a young age.

When the excuse of faith fails, however, as it does when politicians are cornered in discussions of federal policy issues or civil and constitutional rights, they refuse to recognize the term homophobia as to them their fear is legitimized by their faith, thus they are anti-gay. What is the result of anti-gay politics? The restrictions of rights, the spreading of fear of gay people and demonizing them through media. The result is the creation of an environment in our society where anyone who is different, who is gay or perceived as gay, is made to feel less than those around them, and in the cases of anyone and in particular young people struggling to develop a healthy sense of self and understanding of their own sexuality, the result can be suicide.

Mr. McCance in Arkansas is a good example of the result of the socialization of homophobia into our society. The rhetoric he used was hateful rhetoric that could only be borne out of fear of the impact of gay people on society, fear of the impact of homosexuality on his children and fear of how a society accepting of people who are gay would affect his own life. The same can be said for the anti-marriage effort in Iowa for the 2010 midterm elections. Hateful and vile rhetoric was used to demonize gay people, to compare them to many types of behavior criminalized by our society, including and especially bestiality, and rhetoric that ultimately leads to the question, what should gay people do?

If gay people are so bad, what should they do to be 'better' or to fit in with this fictional society conservatives like to allude to that is moral and virtuous? Well, since it is a choice, they need to change and live decent lives as heterosexuals. Barring that they should just stop being sexually active altogether. Since it would be unacceptable to any heterosexual to be forced to be celibate, it seems contradictory to then require that of homosexuals.

As all credible studies have shown that homosexuals are not able to alter their sexual behavior and preferences in the long-term, and therapy to support changing orientation has been deemed harmful to the individual by the American Psychiatric Association, as well as other national medical organizations, then the question is for those who can't or won't change, what should they do? Should they be rounded up and put in camps? Should they be forced to move into a specific part of this country, maybe reservations? Should they be forced to leave this country even though they are American citizens? How far does the reasoning go? How far does the anti-gay lobby want to go with their vision of a gay-free America?

There is a difference between people who have faith and believe in their faith's teachings about homosexuality and those who would want to legislate it. The difference is the fear. By playing on a common discomfort with the subject of homosexuality, the anti-gay lobby incites that fear in others. But most reasonable people recognize that it is fear, most people don't want to be bothered policing the lives of others and recognize that common 'live and let live' or 'do unto your neighbor...' philosophy. That is why the National Organization for Marriage uses the issue of voters' rights to spread their message.

In conclusion, if America is bettered by denying gay people civil rights, then what is the ultimate goal for anti-gay activists? Because of the rhetoric they use and the ideology they propose we know that they are hateful toward gay people. If that hate doesn't arise from fear of LGBT, than where does it come from? Ultimately hatred causes bigotry, and in any respect to any other minority group that bigotry would be denounced and would not be tolerated.

The Homosexual Patriot

There was a consistent theme among the campaigns of Tea Party candidates, and within the propaganda of the continuing Tea Party movement, that they are on the side of 'truth' and 'liberty'. Most of us probably remember being taught at young ages that lying is bad, that we are supposed to tell the truth, meaning admit to something we've done. For some this is a religiously informed moral issue, for some it is a matter of developing a firm ethical mindset not dependent on a religious ideology. For most of us, though, we are taught that there is one truth, one reality, one concrete right and wrong.

As we grow up, however, and especially as we educate ourselves about the world around us, we recognize that 'good' and 'evil', 'right' and 'wrong' are often subjective. On an individual level it is easy to differentiate between the two in terms of one's own actions and behaviors. When we expand our scope of subject to a whole community or even a whole culture, things grow very murky. That is one thing that empirical data and facts are supposed to help clarify. One of the benefits of science, and specifically how it's been applied to social sciences, is that we have quantitative descriptions and results of surveys regarding the impact of our behaviors. These surveys and studies, however, are not entirely faultless, they can be skewed toward a specific answer or research goal, questions and problems designed to find certain outcomes.

This is one reason why we look toward independent groups, groups not tied to, associated with or who financially support political campaigns and ideological groups. We have many organizations like this in this country, some are directly involved in statistical analysis and we see their names most often during an election season as they tabulate polls. The other body we look to for empirical studies and information are to independent universities, either non-religious private schools or even religious private schools known for impartiality, or toward public universities. Even within these bodies are individual researchers and professors looking for specific answers or for answers that reflect their own beliefs. There are, however, standards imposed on them and critical analysis and discussion of their work, including refuting articles and surveys to disprove overtly skewed and partial findings.

Why am I mentioning all of this? Because it becomes very important when looking at political candidates, campaigns and specifically campaign ads. The idea of a campaign ad is to either stress all the good things about a specific candidate or to attack their opponent. The art of an attack ad, as I see it, is to make the opponent look bad and distance them from the electorate, all while making the candidate sponsoring the ad either look good by comparison or attacking in a way that doesn't cause a negative reaction against the sponsoring candidate. We saw this with several ads that had, with some, drastic, impacts on the campaigns and ultimate defeats of certain candidates this year. Jack Conway, for one, ran an attack ad against Rand Paul that included information about activities of Paul during college when he was 19. That ad allowed Paul to inch ahead and ultimately claim a strong victory. Sharon Angles with her ads tying Harry Reid to illegal immigration was another ad that had blow back, or in which there was a negative reaction back on Angles.

Ideally we'd like to think that even though ads stretch the truth or skew the truth, that they do present the truth. Often, and I'd like to say that it happens more often with Republican candidates but I know that's not true, the truth gets so obscured by the message the ad tries to convey or by the spin on the facts presented that the facts actually are misrepresented or are outright lies. Sharon Angles, for example, in her ad tying Harry Reid to illegal immigrants outright lied about portions of legislation he helped sponsor or move forward in the Senate, claiming they did exactly the opposite of what the language really was about. This was part of the way the Tea Party worked, they were responsive only to message and not to facts or reality.

Then enters the National Organization for Marriage and the Iowa elections. This organization along with Focus on the Family, and the seemingly credible in name only Family Research Council, spent millions on a bus tour around the state, including candidates for Iowa legislative positions, all aimed at removing three of that state's Supreme Court justices. The message they tried to promote was that Iowans should have been allowed to vote on same-sex marriage, that the judges were engaging in the worst kind of 'judicial legislating' or 'judicial activism'. That message resonated with voters in a state that has often been mainstream liberals, part of the upper Midwestern Democratic political base arising from the farmer and labor unions and incorporated into the state Democratic parties. In MN, for example, the state party is called the DFL, or the Democratic Farmer Labor party as there used to be, decades ago, a separate Farmer Labor party.

I've written over and over again about the hypocrisy of the Tea Party movement, and of its outright ignorance of both the political process and politics in general. This, however, is less about the Tea Party voters across the country and more about the politics of it all. There is no 'liberty' or 'freedom' while one group of Americans is denied the same rights that are expected and taken for granted by another group of Americans. Also, and many of our founders recognized and remarked on this, the rights of the minority should never be put up to a popular vote. The majority would never choose to advance or protect the rights of the minority. This is what we've seen in a number of states where the issue of same-sex marriage has been put to a vote. This is also why we see political blow back from enough of the Iowan electorate to successfully remove three justices from the state Supreme Court, an act that has never happened in that state's history. The argument by the anti-marriage people is that the citizens have a right to vote on the measure. That somehow by upholding their constitutional responsibilities as interpreters of laws and their constitutionality, the Supreme Court had overstepped their authority and infringed on the rights of state voters.

Just to rehash the historical significance of the same-sex marriage judicial decisions versus the voter rights issue, inter-racial marriage laws existed throughout the country until one case on the matter succeeded through the federal court system and eventually to the Supreme Court, thereby striking down all laws barring inter-racial marriage in this country. If there was to be a popular vote on the matter during the 1950's and 60's when that case was being considered, would the voters have recognized the rights of those individuals? No. How can I tell, because the representatives of those voters in the legislative branch never repealed that law, and in fact had fought all through that period to keep Jim Crow laws and segregation. A similar case happened in the more recent case in which the Supreme Court struck down the anti-sodomy law in Texas after two gay men who had been in the privacy of their home had been arrested and charged with sodomy. That law had remained in place until the court struck it down, and then not long after voted to ban any and all forms of legal recognition for gay and lesbian couples both within the state and unions from other states.

So now we get to the crux of this idea of 'truth' that I talked about earlier. We have decades of studies supporting the positive impact of gay civil rights on gay individuals, on their communities and on our society at large. We have multiple studies proving that children raised by gay couples are in no more danger of being molested, turning gay or doing poorly in school as those raised by heterosexuals. In states where gay marriage has already been the law for most of the decade, namely Massachusetts, there has been no significant impact on the marriages of heterosexual people, churches haven't been forced to recognize or perform gay marriages, and people of faith haven't been forced by the state to accept homosexuality in a way contrary to their beliefs. Gay people and the recognition of their human and civil rights are a reality in this country just as they are a reality all around the world. In nations around the globe there is greater tolerance and acceptance of LGBT people and even recognition of their relationships. Some of the nations that already have same-sex marriage are surprising as they are historically and predominantly Catholic. Others that are just as surprising have civil unions, civil partnerships or domestic partnership laws recognizing the rights of LGBT couples.

When groups like the National Organization for Marriage parade around and yell about 'truth' and about 'freedom', they are lying to people. From their perspective the rhetoric they are using is important, is necessary to save their vision of America, and is the truth. What is apparent to anyone not central to that organization or to groups like Focus on the Family is that what is also clear is that what is important to them is hatred. For all of their talk about freedom what they really want is the ability to discriminate and hate with impunity. They want a state that reflects their ideas and beliefs while rejecting anyone who disagrees with them. A state constructed around their ideology would only permit sanctioned behaviors and would punish anyone who didn't fit into their rigid models. What's probably most ironic about these people is that there is a total disregard for policing their own behaviors. While purporting to be Christians they act without charity or compassion, they denigrate and demonize whole groups of people and use dehumanizing language to depict two specific fictional narratives, one a reality in which gay marriage is legal and America descends into complete chaos because of its depravity, the other a fictional tale of America returning to some version of itself that never existed and was never possible in part by prohibiting immoral behaviors.

This is the same ideology that would outlaw abortion, and following the logic of outlawing any non-sanctioned behaviors, then pornography would be illegal, alcohol would be illegal, smoking would be illegal, literature and media, especially the internet and video games, would be censured for anything deemed illicit and for violence. They parade around their own moral behavior and cite examples of the 'truth' as dictated through the research of groups like the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family, as well as specifically anti-gay groups like Exodus International. These groups represent their 'facts' as empirical and their opinions as representative of the majority of people in this country, but here is the hard reality - these are political organizations. They fund ads campaigning for ballot initiatives and either for or against specific candidates. They participate in lobbying and campaigning through passing out literature, signing petitions and on-the-ground campaigns, meaning knocking on doors and making phone calls. These are not the activities of departments at a university that puts out studies and surveys. It is not the behavior of independent polling groups.

So what is the 'truth'. As the Senate Majority Leader in Iowa said recently while quoting his daughter in speaking to a group of conservative men denigrating gay people and same-sex marriage, "You've already lost. My generation could care less." That is the problem with all the people who want to prohibit behavior and demonize whole groups of people. As we move forward even fiscal conservatives are socially progressive. That is one of the reasons why Megan McCain is worried about the radical elements of the Tea Party pushing the Republican party into irrelevancy. Our nation was founded on radically progressive ideas that we all should not only have rights, as other nations had those, but that we should be an entirely representative government in which we are governed not just 'by the people' but also 'for the people'. Any act, then, that exercises those 'inalienable' rights is a patriotic act. Anyone who would deny those rights to any one citizen or who would obstruct their pursuit of 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' is then unpatriotic, and un-American.

Thereby, all people of the LGBT community who live their lives in honesty, whether publicly open or not, and who pursue their own vision of who they are and what they want their lives to be is a patriot. It is a revolutionary act to challenge a norm dictated to us by an inflexible and violently fascist societal regime. When they gain political power or control over us we then must make our voices heard even louder and be that much stronger in our conviction not to be dictated to or to be intimidated into fear. Just as the Tea Party enjoys their right to free speech, so to do we, and while they use rhetoric of fear and divisiveness to demonize us and sway public support against us, so too do we have the power of truth and of reality and honesty. In a time when pundits and political fascists try to pervert our perceptions of reality with untruthful polls and un-factual studies, we have the face of honesty and moderation, we have families and individuals who look just like their neighbors and who work alongside everyone else without disrupting others' lives or their communities. We have family members and close friends who have swayed the opinions and hearts of others through love and inspiring those others to open their minds and hearts to the LGBT community and our civil rights.

For all the rhetoric and slogans and political speeches, it is not the Tea Party who are patriots with their fake activism and their historic costumes. It is the minorities of educated people, intellectuals, a group demonized in every other corrupt regime around the world, of LGBT people living their lives in honesty and with respect, of ethnic and racial minorities who refuse to be shut out of institutions of learning and traditional career fields. We are the patriots, we are what makes America a 'melting pot', a blending of cultures. Without us this would be a very different nation. If America is a place of acceptance of diversity, of freedom and of honesty and compassion, then anyone who would deny others rights they themselves enjoy are the poison that is helping to destroy our country.

What Dems could have done to create a Green Economy

Now we've seen the wave and it did indeed sweep through Congress. What's hopeful is that now there is a more balanced legislative body and as long as the Republicans are willing to dance the dance of compromise, along with Dems doing the same, we might finally get things done. That is, of course, contingent on the Republicans not following through with their pledge to making their #1 priority making sure that Obama is a one-term president.

In all the shouting about Health Care and Financial Reform, both of which were important pieces of legislation, the moneys already put into the economy by the Stimulus has yet to see a large recovering in the job market and a reduction in the unemployment rate. What are the problems still holding us back? According to Bill Clinton it's that we don't have people with the skills to fill the jobs opening up. He said on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart that there are three jobs being posted for every one applicant. What he saw as a necessary solution is a concentration on retraining those people still looking to stay in the work-force, those not near retirement age, to move into those positions.

Chris Matthews, on the other hand, says that we need to get back to being a country that builds things. He cited other tough economic times when the government created public works projects that created tons of new jobs that were labor jobs, especially construction jobs, which are some of the industries hardest hit by the death of the job market. Central to his rants about public works projects is that we also need to combine that with looking forward and cites the high speed trains in China.

The truth is that despite all the rhetoric about how we are the greatest country in the world with the greatest technology and the wealthiest country, much of the wealth is in the highest two or three percent of Americans. Much of the technology is locked up in specialized areas of the economy, such as the technology employed by the military. There is absolutely no excuse for the fact that more than a few countries now have high speed rail, or other public works infrastructures that represent investments in green-technology or a desire to be environmentally responsible.

Some countries tap into their geological features such as Iceland which incorporates a large amount of geothermal energy into their power system. They also recycle 95% of their consumer waste. Some people may say that that wouldn't work in the United States, or if they are ignorant and crazy they'd say that that is foreign socialism trying to take over and that that may work 'over there' but it isn't right for America. Well, let me say this - we have to wake up and address serious environmental threats that are affecting our economy which go beyond the BP oil spill. There is more and more trash being dumped into the oceans than ever before. It's not just the United States, but because we have so much coastline for which fishing and the ocean are central parts of their economy, it is crucial that we deal with these things. Another example is, of course, the dying sea food industries in New England, a region for which sea food and fishing are a major economic component.

So what are the solutions? What could Dems have done and could still do?

- Education - We have for decades stressed that kids have to go to college. People put a lot of emphasis on graduating from high school and dropout rates as a problem and then cite kids going on to college as indicators of the success of our education system. Those aren't ways of solving our problems with our work-force. And let's be real, if someone goes on to college and doesn't major in chemistry or engineering, or in a business degree with some practical application like accounting, or in a teaching degree, then that person has to go on to get a master's degree to be competitive at all in a large city. In a high school in metropolitan areas it is necessary to have a master's in order to be competitive. The Solution: Concentrate on funding training programs, not community colleges necessarily, but training programs that specialize in manufacturing and technological fields in the green energy industries. That would represent a green energy commitment that goes beyond rhetoric about 'green technology' and 'green energy solutions'.

- Public Works Projects - What the Obama administration has talked about when talking about infrastructure has been rebuilding highways and bridges. Yes, is that important? Absolutely. And as exhibited by surveys of bridges, we have far too many crumbling bridges. That's not progressive thinking, though, and it's not a solution that provides significant enough jobs, not in comparison to the need for labor positions. What we need is massive works projects like Eisenhower's interstate highway system. Chris Matthews is exactly right when he talks about high speed trains. There is no reason we couldn't have high speed trains at least from Boston to DC that would cut travel time between those cities from eight hours probably down to two or three hours. There is no reason people couldn't take a train from New York to LA in a day or two when they could drive it in two or three but on a train it might take a week. The portioning out of the necessary components of a high speed rail line would be fantastic. You could have a dozen states building what would become the actual train itself. The track for the high speed rail, which despite what some people might think would not be able to run on traditional train tracks because they wouldn't be able to handle the load and stress, would create construction jobs in every area it went through and at the very least could be contracted out to a handful or more of construction groups. All of this would go toward a type of building project that would potentially have an enormous impact on our travel habits and how we think about green solutions.

- Government Contracts - One of the things I've been saying for a few years now was that because the US government leases SO many cars for their agencies and government employees, everything from bureau chiefs having government supplied cars to the cars that security and law enforcement forces use, there is an immediate market for the manufacturing and commercial distribution of clean energy cars. Now whether that would be hybrid cars or hydrogen cars would be a logistical issue. I think, however, that if the US government contracted with Honda, who came out a few years ago with a hydrogen fueled car, for a few thousand hydrogen cars and put in the fuel stations to supply fuel for those cars, we could have commercially viable clean energy cars gaining a major foothold in this country. Honda hasn't been the only company working on a hydrogen fueled car either. GMC has been working on a model for years. How close that is to production, I don't know, but if one major hurdle to revolutionizing our fleet of government leased cars is trying to buy American made cars, then hopefully that solution will come soon.

- Green Energy Solutions - More than a decade ago in MN there was a controversy over a nuclear power plant. At that time there was a lot of discussion about alternative energy solutions, since MN is a state that bases the vast majority of its economy on the environment, between the huge number of farms or the enormous amount of travel business brought in by our wilderness areas and lakes. It was interesting to hear a serious discussion in the early 1990's about the many types of green energy sources, especially biomass, ethanol and solar and wind power. Now when you drive through parts of MN, especially southern MN, you see wind farms with dozens of massive wind turbines where it was once nothing but rows of corn. We are a state that has for years sought green energy sources and solutions. Whatever green energy revolution we have in this country will have to come from a diversified energy portfolio. Some types of green energy that might work in one part of the country simply will not work in another. In MN solar power isn't practical as for much of the autumn, winter and parts of the spring it is too overcast. That's one reason why wind power makes sense, especially in parts of the state known for their wind storms and tornadoes. Solar power does work, however, in areas with large expanses of desert, or in areas with arid plains not really suitable for farming and maybe not really suitable for grazing livestock. I'm not sure what the issues would be with power companies, but if our government were serious about green energy, we would be building strategic power stations that played on the strengths of those natural resources and leasing them out to companies. That would provide jobs on the local level while having a major impact on our energy consumption.

- Green Production - To piggy back off of a few earlier points, our government builds and renovates government buildings all the time. Buildings have to be maintained and updated constantly all across this country. If we are serious about the development of green industries, than it is crucial to not just talk about green energy, but to draw upon the many industries producing green construction materials and green cleaning products, as well as recycling. Just a simple internet search shows that there are many types of construction materials and products that are green and just as good as traditional materials. Anyone who has looked through the aisle at the supermarket with the cleaning supplies knows that there are environmentally friendly products out there. Even adding exterior features to existing buildings, specifically solar panels, would not only boost the availability and production of solar panels but also provide even more energy solutions on the local level.

What's important to realize about all of these is that suggestions is that they all either train people for jobs or create jobs. The push for green energy and production and the creation of new jobs are not mutually exclusive. The government has the potential to do these things on a massive scale and thereby ensuring that our nation finally gets out of the dark and back into a leadership position in green technologies. All we have to do is look to model countries, especially in northern Europe, to see that these are real and concrete solutions and that the options for incorporating these solutions into our society through government agencies is enormous.

All of these things could have been done by Democrats right away and have placated the base, or could still be done through compromise with Republicans, many of whom have a vested interest in environmental action, and to have stimulated desirable areas of the economy and created jobs.

When I would vote for a Republican president

There is a problem with the modern Republican party, I've talked about it a lot and firmly believe it. The current politics of the Republican Party do not represent the conservative values espoused by their own rhetoric. We see it most clearly in the campaigns for national office among the varied districts around the country: Conservative Christian social values issues trump economic and domestic policy issues. When the races get close or competitive, Republicans fall back on those old wedge issues of abortion, gay marriage, gun rights and separation of church and state.

Now, just to get this out of the way, the separation of church and state is fact, it is irrefutable by any thinking rational person and has repeated precedent over centuries of law. There is no turning away from that even with a neo-con dominated high court. The values of freedom of religion is so fundamental to this nation, it was one of the primary reason for immigration to this country in the first place. All those people who deny outright the separation of church and state or insist that it isn't what the founders intended are either deluded to the point of lunacy or they are playing so far to the right that they may as well be playing to a fascist party. Yet, in a crazy election year like this, we see it among far too many candidates.

As for those others, they are part of the rhetorical 'Guns, God and Gays' routine that Karl Rove designed as the presidential and national Republican strategy for the 2004 election. Notice, however, that the election in 2006, possibly a part reaction to that election, saw a sweeping wave of Democratic candidates elected into office. It is also a device that played strongly to the Christian elements of the Republican platform by bringing evoking their fears of a secular nation that turns away from faith and even persecutes those of faith, the supposedly warring sides of what Bill O'Reilly terms the 'culture wars'. Those advocating this kind of conflict then become the 'culture warriors'.

The hypocrisy then becomes the parallel messages of 'freedom and liberty' used by conservative candidates matched with socially conservative message of restricting rights for all minority people. It is the blending of the message of an overreaching government infringing upon the private lives of citizens while espousing the exact same infringement the conservative movement is against, only against the groups they purposefully exclude from full citizen-hood. As long as groups agree with their ideological stance, they are represented by the conservative message, those who disagree are deemed un-American and enemies of freedom.

What that message effectively does is pit those people who have strong Christian faiths, notice they are never reaching out to other people of even similar faiths such as the Jewish community, while at the same time purposely courting the 'white vote' by excluding minority people of conservative Christian faiths, i.e. African Americans and Latino people. Those groups, from a conservative faith perspective, should be sympathetic to the Christian Republican cause on many social issues, yet they largely and historically voted Democrat. What about that rationale makes sense ultimately boils down to the 'white vote' and institutionalized racism. They hate being called racist and fight against that name, but when they campaign on the principles of exclusion in part by using what Rachel Maddow identifies as the 'Southern Strategy' employed during the 1960's and inciting fears of white people, there really can't be any other name for it.

Ultimately the effect of this strategy and this type of rhetoric is the denial of full citizen-hood to many minority groups. They play on the fears of less educated and less affluent white people, particularly in South and the Western United States, fears of becoming the minority in this country, of preferential treatment to racial and ethnic minorities to the detriment of the rights of white people, and to the enforcement of 'socialist' values such as 'wealth redistribution'. It is the same rhetoric that would have denied African Americans the right to vote and enforced segregation in schools and public places. It is the same rhetoric that on a non-superficial level enforced the idea that somehow people of darker skin were less-human and less deserving of the rights enjoyed by a white majority.

But the messages of the conservative white Christian political movement are not ultimately compatible with the message of 'freedom and liberty'. What it is conducive to is the politics of exclusion, of the continued institutionalization of 'freedoms and liberties' for white people, a principle which can't be construed as anything but outright racism and homophobia. It is also a message that numerous 'liberal' or 'moderate' Republicans are against. While many of these Republicans are conservative on fiscal issues, they are at least moderate on social issues. They are also often Republicans from historically Union states. By Union, I am referring to the label of the northern states during the Civil War. Yes, it is ludicrous, but the rift between these two cultural ideals goes further back even than that. Many people from the South are proud of their Confederate roots, roots they see as upholding the principles of freedom and states' rights. They see themselves as representing an oppressed group rebelling against a tyrannical federal government, romanticizing the culture of that time, and ignoring the rampant hostility toward and racist treatment of African American people. It is a sentiment that still supports outright and institutionalized racism in parts of this country and it is a belief system many conservative political candidates court while running for office.

Given the current political climate, and particularly the recent issues that the LGBT community is having with President Obama, although it is extremely unlikely, if there was a Republican candidate who was even moderate on social issues, I would have to strongly consider whether or not to vote for them. I, of course, voted for Obama in 2008. Unlike many of the progressive young people who voted based on the idea that he would radically change the way that Washington operates, my family has been involved with politics for a long time, I knew that the fundamental machinations are almost impossible to change. I said to people at that time and continue to believe that the most important thing that has happened with President Obama was that we finally had a president who moved the rhetoric and policies of this country out of the realm of the conservative Christian movement and back to the mainstream. We finally had a president who was openly supportive of the rights of LGBT people and still is a very vocal advocate for the recognition of our civil rights. Unfortunately parts of his record, especially of late, do not match his words. And given the almost certain climate of Washington in the near future, which is going to gain more conservatives in Congress, it will be almost impossible for him and the progressive base to have any movement forward through legislation, it is going to have to be through the courts. Unless the Senate is able to sway some of the moderate Republicans after the elections are over, and especially after the military study is finished, to end the filibuster on the Defense Authorization Bill with the provision on Don't Ask, Don't Tell included, Obama's appeal of the current case overturning the decision will end any possible repeal of that policy in the near future. If a Republican wins the White House in 2012, it will almost certainly be another decade before that policy is repealed. How, then, can we support a president, however vocal he is about his support for the LGBT community, when in the hour of critical success for our rights, he decides to turn his back on the best chance for that policy to end.

I don't want to vote Republican ever. I disagree with so many principles of their agenda. It is also likely that it will be dangerous for the progress of this country to vote for the candidate who receives the nomination in 2012. It will, however, be a hard decision if a socially moderate candidate is put forward and the economic plan of the progressives in Washington are not successful. Lowering taxes is clearly not the answer, which was evident during the first six years of the Bush presidency when the Republicans controlled Congress and he instituted huge tax breaks that ultimately only stimulated an even further (upward) redistribution of wealth toward the super rich. If the future president is able to institute some of the public works projects, projects that were enormously successful in the past and are proven ways of getting much of the labor industries back to work, than it might be worth it to see a change from a president who overall has, in an attempt to make genuine bipartisan policy decisions, shown a disheartening lack of leadership. As Rachel Maddow has said, it became obvious early on that the Republicans were going to prove a huge roadblock toward every major piece of legislation introduced on behalf of the president, so why didn't he go all out and just go for the full on progressive agenda like a public option in the health care act? It may be time to find a new candidate.

Thoughts about the Second Amendment and it's 'Remedies'

The title, obviously, refers to the famous quote by Sharon Angles, a candidate who I hope won't win her campaign to take Harry Reid's seat in the US Senate. She proudly sides herself with the right on the right to bear arms. This brings into play the conservative movement dream wedge issue, one of several they dip into whenever they have tough elections ahead, and that is the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms.

One of the things that is disturbing about the rhetoric that Angles uses, which allies her with the explicit language used by militia and anti-government paramilitary groups around the country, is the idea that one of the principle reasons for us to be able to own and use weapons as private citizens is to overthrow a 'tyrannical' government. Of course this endears her to the radical fringe that has been a primary source of energy for the Tea Party, but it also brings to the mainstream the perspective of those people who agree with that premise and illustrates exactly how fringe their overall political views are.

As with all the articles and amendments in the US Constitution, the Second Amendment has received review and interpretation by the courts and especially by the Supreme Court. The high court has dealt with a number of aspects of this issue regarding regulation and detailing legal uses of guns. It also has had a handful of landmark cases which set important precedents in the way we interpret constitutional rights as a whole.

I think it is interesting, however, to think about the understanding of warfare and the vision of a civil society that the founders had when designing the Constitution. I think that it is important for us to recognize our necessary participation in shaping our democracy, in determining those who would represent us and in providing a balance through our votes against those who would radically alter our society to all our detriment.

It is important to consider the vision of those founders when we are in a post-nuclear age. A professor of mine in college described the change in the literature and art of the late-Victorian to early modernist periods at the end of the 19th and early 20th century as arising out of the effect industrialization had on the world. In particular, the effect that the horrors of 'modern' warfare had on a whole generation of young people during WWI. That war was famous for millions of miles of trenches, and the development of trench warfare, which would often create 'killing fields' between trench positions where enemy forces could be held in stand still for months.

This modern war also saw mass production of machines that had been developing as weapons during the previous decades and their use across the theater of war. These machines put horrifying and inhuman faces on a world changing far more quickly than people could have imagined. That inhumanity of war-machines and weaponry only continued to develop so that by the time of the Pacific campaigns of WWII, we had developed weapons with the potential to kill millions with a single bomb.

There are also some very important differences between the facts around gun ownership now as then. For one, the standards of weaponry were such that a single-shot rifle was high-tech. Also, at least during the Revolutionary War and sometimes afterward, members of the military were usually required to provide their own arms. Neither of these things are true anymore. We no longer use single-shot guns, and the process of reloading the gun is quick. And while there are weapons that are legal only for members of law enforcement or for those in active military service, the technology of the arms available to the civilian population is remarkable.

That, more than anything, is what gives me problems with the idea of the right to bear arms. Why would someone, for the purposes of home protection or for hunting, need any kind of automatic weapon? If the right to bear arms was intended for and still is of a purpose to provide personal protection, how does an Uzi accomplish that anymore than a simple handgun? Considering the potential for 'accidents', which often means children finding a parent's gun and setting it off, doesn't the state have a vested interest in providing some standards of regulation? If the argument is that a responsible gun owner would teach their children not to handle the weapon or to handle the weapon safely, isn't teaching them how to use the weapon inviting them to use it? One could argue that point all they want but it is a commonly true generality that if you forbid a child something they will want it or do it.

People always seem to want 'freedom', or at least lack of government involvement, until something goes wrong and then they want to know why the government didn't step in. They don't want the government regulating their right to gun ownership, but then when their children are killed by gunfire, especially in the frighteningly frequent episodes of children bringing guns to school and opening fire, or when the same thing happens with adults in the workplace, there is always an outcry for why the shooter was allowed access to a gun.

The most famous school example is of course Columbine, the high school in Colorado where two disturbed teenagers held hostage and killed numerous classmates before killing themselves. There are obviously many other issues revolving around the two youths choosing to take such action, but ultimately the mantra that 'guns don't kill people, people kill people,' is little comfort for the families of the teens killed that day. The fact is that if those two hadn't had access to guns they wouldn't have been able to shoot up the school. Psychological and social issues aside, which of course played a role but were far more complex in trying to address, the simplest and most expedient solution would have been taking away their guns.

So, as a society, we've tried to argue back and forth between what we feel is right and what we feel are our rights. Do we allow private citizens to own weapons that a could be considered military-grade? If we do that, how do we decide what weapons are appropriate for military and law enforcement use but not for civilian use? And then how do we convince people who think that's a decision they should make for themselves that it is actually for all of us to decide? If we are going to argue about whether society should approve of same-sex marriage or on issues of immigration, why can't we insist that we as a society gets to decide on whether or not everyone should have access to automatic firearms?

I was watching tonight/s episode of The Rachel Maddow Show and she stopped by a prominent gun shop in Las Vegas, trying out several automatic weapons. For some the main argument for having automatic weapons is for the purposes of sportsmanship. If a hunter needs to be able to spray multiple rounds a second at an animal, they are a terrible hunter and should be doing target practice and not hunting with an Uzi. And it is a problem, to me, when I see what is basically a quasi-paramilitary culture being promoted or proliferating through gun culture. Are they enthusiasts because they romanticize the idea of owning a gun and being a soldier when for whatever reason they did not enter service themselves?

To me it is simple. If you are a hunter, there are weapons that are appropriate, even with advanced technology, for sportsmanship/hunting purposes. They do not include automatic assault rifles. My family owns hunting rifles, I know people who hunt, and there is nothing wrong with a gun with an easier reload or less jerk back or a better scope or site or with the ability to shoot several rounds in a quick succession. That's not the same as hunting with an Uzi.

I also don't necessarily have a problem with the idea of guns among law enforcement and military personnel. They are trained, and their behavior and psychological situations under some scrutiny so that we have few renegade cops, though the Army's recent standards seems to have led to an increase in number of disturbed people entering service or with criminal assaults and murders among service members. But either way, they are trained and understand the idea of appropriate and inappropriate use of weapons.

Weapons are for killing, pure and simple. While there may be design elements to them that are appealing, I find swords, knives and historical weaponry to be very interesting, and while there is some collectible or aesthetic value to antique firearms, even these were designed for the purpose of harming others and can be of some danger. If we treat weapons with a cavalier attitude, especially if someone with children treat them with such, than we pass that cavalier attitude on to others and help to foster this concept that somehow it is 'safe' to use them. Weapons are never safe, maybe they are safe for the user as they don't backfire, but they are never 'safe'.

Returning to Angles and the idea of 'Second Amendment remedies', it is clear she's talking about violent overthrow of the government, or acts of domestic terrorism like taking out legitimately elected officials. This is a danger to our democracy and is the kind of sponsorship of civil strife you see among many of the nations we consider 'Third World'. That is one reason why the woman and why the conservative Tea Party members are so dangerous.

In a time when anxiety is so high and people are suffering across the country, they scapegoat groups like Latino people and the issue of illegal immigration, or they scapegoat LGBT people and the issue of same-sex marriage, then paint all people who sympathize or are even rational about those groups and issues as 'enemies', using rhetorical devices to identify them as illegitimate like 'socialist' or 'communist', and then describe solutions involving violence, they are fueling the fires of domestic terrorism and civil unrest. They are encouraging those among them who send toxic substances to Congressmen, try to cause an explosion by cutting the gas line at the home of another Congressman's family member, and go armed to political rallies held by the president. All of this has been documented as happening this year.

For the rest of us, who are legitimately upset about the political process, who are afraid of our personal financial situations and those of friends and family, and who see the rhetoric of this election cycle as one more step to total anarchy, it is frightening. Most Americans do not feel the extreme anger of those lashing out with violence. While we sympathize with the sentiments, the vast majority of us choose to exercise our rights through voting, through protest and free speech. We know that if we get worked up that we can yell and shout about the issues important to us. We do not, however, believe in the kind of physical violence that extremists in this country want to promote as normal, rational, understandable, excusable and mainstream.

Our founders fought against a true tyrant, the kind of tyrant that very few in this country could really recognize. They were given no representation and were being drained of revenue by a foreign power that took direct military action to enforce its policies. Those who identify Obama with this type of dictator belittle the efforts of our founders. They also belittle the lives of so many in nations that still suffer under true dictators today, who have no freedom of speech or religion, who cannot gather in protest, and who are not allowed to oppose the government's policies in any way. These people should go and try to live in one of these many other countries to see how bad it really gets. They should suffer under dictators who would imprison, torture or even kill them for their opinions. Then they would have a legitimate understanding of what it means to be an American.

Young, Gay, Married...Well Optomistic At Least

I ran across this article on Facebook which was posted by The Good Men Project, entitled Young, Gay and Still Married. The article revisits several couples in Massachusetts who had gotten married, or were planning on getting married. That state is one of only a handful around the country that allow full marriage to same-sex couples, those states being Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and Washington, D.C. I'll talk more about that later in this post.

I wanted to write about this because I was in Massachusetts during the political firestorm surrounding the recognition of same-sex unions and I think it had a profound effect on some parts of my outlook on life. The first thing I want to say is that in spite of all the rhetoric surrounding the 'activist judges' and all that, those judges agreed to stay their Sept. 2003 ruling until May of 2004 to give the Congress a chance to deal with it legislatively. Their decision was based on the Massachusetts constitution, which they were proud to state was the oldest constitution in the United States, having predated that of our nation. The fact that there was a stay on that ruling was a clear indicator that those judges were willing to be reasonable and allow there to be a legislative process to go forward, allowing the lawful representatives of voters to work out the issue. A constitutional convention was convened and a period of political maneuvering, campaigning and strong-arming created a pressurized situation especially around the Boston metro that grew painful the closer we got to the deadline set by their Supreme Court and the end of the stay of the decision.

Immediately after that stay ended, couples lined up at city halls all over the state, and especially in Cambridge and Boston, to get their marriage licenses. While most of those couples were, and still are, older couples, many middle aged or older, there was some presence of young people from the very beginning. Many good articles were written at that time about the effects of the recognition of marriage on the gay community and on LGBT people individually. One of the best, however, discussed its effect on young people, including interviews with young people who lived in and around Boston. That article in particular had a profound affect on me and forced me to rethink a lot of things. Aside from more specifically personal issues, it made me reexamine what I thought about the institution of marriage in general. I was pretty pessimistic about marriage before that, understandably so in light of the rate of divorce and the oft-ignored topic of monogamy and fidelity among married people. As there were already civil unions available in certain cities and in the state of Vermont, I had taken a position that marriage as an institution and a concept was at its core a means of social control that had been passed down from prehistory. I still believe that, and actually know it when you look at the logic behind that argument. It doesn't, however, mean that there isn't value to it on the societal level as well as the personal level.

Almost instantly after the stay of the ruling ended, when I watched the first couples entering the Cambridge City Hall on television, I was numbed by the fact that same-sex marriage had become reality, that those opposed to it hadn't succeeded in yet another attempt to deny us rights, and that as it had overcome its last legal hurdle would probably be there to stay. Soon after it hit me that I in fact could marry, that all those ideas I'd had about marriage weren't important to me as they'd been in part fueled by resentment in the knowledge that I would most likely never be able to be in a legally recognized marriage. With the publication of that article on same-sex marriage and its effect on the youth of our community, I was shocked by how things quickly changed in my head. Some of the things that were so striking to me were particular anecdotes about how young people were now discussing marriage and thinking about it as something that they might be interested in. They were shifting their thoughts about relationships and the purpose of dating toward something more akin to how my heterosexual friends thought about it, that at some point dating becomes not-casual and that relationships that aren't on their way toward marriage had a sell-by date. A close friend of mine actually had a time frame he'd set for himself in terms of determining whether a relationship would end in marriage or whether it wouldn't and if it wouldn't than he'd break it off. To him, the purpose of dating is to find a partner you can eventually commit to and build a life with. For him that meant eventually committing to each other through marriage.

Most powerful of all, though, was a comment that was made in the article about something that might on the surface seem trivial but for which most older people and many young people in less tolerant parts of the country might recognize the importance of. That something was that now a young gay person might have a conversation with a parent about how to pick out a ring. My mind expanded on that into conversations heterosexual people may have with their parents about marriage and what it's like and advice they may have. For someone who never expected to be allowed to get married, and whose parents at that time were still very uncomfortable and sometimes hostile to the topic of his sexuality, the idea that some young gay person could sit down and have those kinds of conversations with parents who loved them, wanted them to be happy, and who could be a little less worried about what struggles their child might have to go through, that was powerful.

I'm not in a place in my life right now where I am looking to settle down and part of that is that I do not have a partner who I would want to settle down with. What changed for me, though, was that I realized at that time that I could do so if I wanted to. I didn't have to wait or expect to wait until I was middle aged before I found someone to settle down with. I didn't have to look for people, who were usually older, who were in that place where they'd want to make some kind of 'rest of your life' commitment. I could in fact marry someone my own age, at that time I was in my early-mid twenties, and I could look forward to spending thirty, forty, or fifty years with that person rather than going from one 'long-term' relationship to another, none lasting more than a handful of years at a time. For many of us that was reality, that those friends of ours who were more equipped psychologically to find partners and be in relationships, almost none of those relationships lasted longer than a few years, maybe a decade if they were lucky. Even now divorce or breakups between gay couples somewhat mirror straight couples.

It is really difficult, maybe impossible, to explain to heterosexual people the psychological impact of what gaining the ability to marry meant to us. As it is there are far too many people who talk about the sanctity of marriage and how it is fundamental to the structure of our society, many of whom have a rank cavalier attitudes about their own marriage and have had multiple divorces, such as Rush Limbaugh. Marriage, however, implies a level of commitment that civil unions never will. Marriage implies an inviolable commitment and bond that on a purely emotional level provides security and faith in one's partner. It relieves anxieties about the future of a relationship and anxieties over how society, and especially essential services such as hospital care, views your relationship. Young people can look forward to having that security. We can all have a bit more hope for the futures of our relationships and of our own personal security in society because there is legal recognition of our civil contract, that hospitals should treat us as spouses and we should be allowed to make decisions on our partner's behalf, as well as visitation rights and all of that.

For those of us who are older and grew up with the stigma and cloud of anxiety and doubt and fear those things are powerful. It is maybe even more powerful that there are young people at least in some places that are growing up with fewer and fewer of those anxieties to begin with. They can have more hope, and because of all of this they can find partners with whom it is easier to have stable and healthy relationships. They can look for partners with an expectation of eventually wanting to settle down and marry thereby changing the criteria used in their evaluation process. They can insist on the quality of relationships that lead to healthier and happier lives. None of us is guaranteed these things or precluded from them because of our age and where we live, but in a state like Massachusetts where we aren't just tolerated, but actually embraced, more and more teens are growing up without having internalized those prejudiced.

Today I read about another gay youth, this one a man in his mid-twenties, who committed suicide. He was an activist who went to one of the high school programs in New York City specifically designed to provide safe spaces for LGBT youth, and lived in one of the boroughs. This young person is the latest in a series of well publicized suicides among gay youth, some just in their early teens, at a time when LGBT people and the issues we face are getting huge exposure. These teens aren't the only ones who are committing suicide, they are also not even the only gay youth who are committing suicide, however they are the ones getting coverage and bringing this dark social disease that has been plaguing our community probably since prehistory, to light and to the national stage. It is so important that young people have hope and that they are presented with a world full of possibilities so they can overcome the many things which make adolescence so difficult in general but for LGBT youth especially. One way for that to happen is for the laws of this country to change to recognize and accommodate the rights of gay people, such as repealing 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'. Another and maybe more important way is for the laws preventing same-sex marriage to be struck down and for them to see that no matter who they want to be, whatever life they aspire to have, and whatever they dream of doing, that they those options are available to them. If they don't dream of getting married and having a family, that is not a problem. However, for those who want that, or even for those who feel the absence of that right as a judgment of value on who they are or on their status as an outsider in our society, they need to see these laws changed. They need to have those legal forms of discrimination repealed so that they have time to lose some of those internalized feelings of self-loathing and hatred that often lead to suicide. In this way, same-sex marriage and its legal status becomes for many an issue of survival.

Now there are states that recognize gay marriage already, and I've listed those above but I'll list their abbreviations here: CT, DC, IA, MA, NH, VT. Countries that recognize full marriage equality, and this is interesting as it is important to note those with a historically overwhelming majority of Catholics: Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Iceland, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain and Sweden. Gay marriages are also recognized and performed in Mexico City, although as far as I know not throughout the rest of that country. Also, it is important to recognize states that do not perform gay marriages but that do recognize them, and those are MD, NY and RI. The issue of same-sex marriage in CA is up in the air right now and has become a lynch-pin in the entire debate.

States that perform Civil Unions in the United States are: CA, CO, HI, ME, NJ, NV, OR, WA, WI. Other nations with some form of Civil Union or Civil Partnerships are: Andorra (a tiny nation tucked between Spain and France), Austria, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, France, Germany, Greenland, Hungary, Ireland, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Slovenia, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and Uruguay. The state of Colorado also has some legislation dealing with domestic partnership that does provide some protection for same-sex partners, in spite of it not being marriage or civil unions.

It is important to note, too, that there are cities and counties around the country that provide domestic partnership registries and offer recognition and legal protections within the city for those registered as domestic partners. Among them are: Lacy, Olympia, Seattle and Tumwater, Washington, in Oregon the city of Ashland, Eugene and Multnomah County, in California many cities recognize domestic partnerships including all the big ones you'd expect such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, Oakland, Berkeley, Nevada also provides domestic partnerships, as does Salt Lake City, as do both Boulder and Denver, Colorado, and Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona. In Minnesota, my home state, the cities of Duluth, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Edina, and Rochester all provide domestic partnerships. Iowa City, IA provides the partnerships though the state provides same-sex marriage. Lawrence, Kansas and the cities of Columbia, Kansas City and St. Louis, Missouri provide domestic partnerships as well.

The list goes on and on, and in particular most metropolitan areas, which one would expect to have a visible LGBT community, have domestic partner registries of some kind. Here's a link to the Wikipedia page providing information on all of this information, including lists and a map of areas of the country with these laws.

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The Paradox of Conservative Populism and Class Warfare

Since the great debates and struggles in Congress to pass health care reform there has been a very vocal and visible conservative opposition to not just health care reform but the entire progressive agenda. The group that galvanized this so effectively was the Tea Party, with their Colonial garb and tea bags and angry slogans. They voiced their opinions by gathering in Washington and using signs that denounced President Obama as a totalitarian dictator, a fascist, a Nazi, a tyrant and a foreigner. They invited the leadership of people like Sarah Palin, who was more than happy to turn her notoriety as a political nobody prior to the 2008 election and her quirky average American-ness into a potent force. Because of the anger and general ignorance of the members of the Tea Party, the message they formed around, protesting taxation and overreach of government, has been subtly and sometimes overtly overtaken and changed to suit the Republican leadership who seized control.

Amidst all the rhetoric about government involvement in the private lives of citizens and their general anger at the lack of representation for their political views by Congress and the White House, there have been many instances of outright contradiction and hypocrisy that is either conveniently ignored or aggressively denied. First is the assertion that the majority of Americans are sympathetic to the message of the Tea Party, namely political revolution against a perceived class of political elites. Second, and this is something that Sarah Palin has always used in her rhetoric, that somehow 'common sense' solutions will stimulate the necessary recovery of our economy, and that if we got the 'elites' out of Washington and put some people with 'common sense' and 'traditional values' into the role of government, then everything would be okay. And third, and this is central to the identification of the 'elites' versus the average/normal American, is the demoniaation of educated people, hence the other part of that title of those dastardly 'educated-elites'.

The rhetorical device of 'educated elites' and class warfare isn't unique to Palin's speeches, and isn't even really unique to this election cycle. Class warfare has been around for as long as there have been struggles to form government and the distinction between economic and political classes. Sometimes this type of political manipulation is done with race, by fusing race, ethnic background and economic status together to form generic profiles of a people on whom to place the blame for the political and economic woes of a given time period. This happened in Germany with the Jews, often a target of adding race to class warfare in Europe. It's happened to the Irish, to the Polish, to the Russians, and often, as we saw in the states of the former Yugoslavia, this has often come to violence and civil war.

One of the key objects of concern that is listed off by those talking about their concerns about the economy and their own financial future is how to send their kids to college, how to educate their children, how to leave their children with a more optimistic future. There is a fundamental problem with the rhetoric when one of the goals, it seems, is to vilify education and those who are educated as being 'out of touch' or somehow diminishing the legitimacy of their policies and legislative efforts while at the same time recognizing the importance of education. Education does more than just give people earning potential, it improves the intellectual capacity and knowledge level of individuals. Education expands an individuals ability to understand the world around them, to be able to think deeper than the vague, provocative slogans some use to try to shape the minds of this country. Even among people who have advanced educations there are political issues so complex that they take years to understand. Our economy is one of those issues.

Unbenounced, perhaps, to people in the Tea Party, this is not the economy of the eighteenth century. The protests at that time were more than just about taxation, but illegal search and seizure, and the lack of due process. When people like Joe Miller argue for legislating strictly by what's written in the original framework and the Constitution, he purposefully ignores the fact that at that time there were no voting rights for women or recognition of citizenship for African Americans. Beyond that, there were, at that time, nothing like the multi-national corporations of today. Even the holding and trading companies of the British Empire at that time pale in comparison to the predatory and consciousless policies of the modern corporation.

Candidates like Christine O'Donnell use explicit class warfare to explain the discrepancies in her education background. She claims she did not get her degree right away because she 'didn't have a trust fund' to pay for school and because she had to pay her student loans back before they'd give her her diploma. Anyone who has gone to college knows how ridiculous that claim is. But by setting up the distinction between her and her opponent, who was Harvard educated and holds advanced degrees, she plays to the element of people who are willing to outright deny the serious allegations of campaign fraud and contradictory statements about political positions and experience level. Even the famous commercial where she denies being a witch, she says 'I'm you.' That effort at populism plays successfully among those who have little understanding of our political system or even care about issues other than acting out on their rage against the political process.

When Sarah Palin plays to the 'average American' element within the Tea Party, she's trying to legitimize her own candidacy for president. She's trying to paint a picture of a government filled with sneering elitists from Boston who went to Harvard, advancing the party message of anger against the government for a variety of reasons that all revolve around their party losing. They're dissatisfied because they didn't want Obama to win, they don't want this country to move forward with a progressive agenda that they feel infringes on their lives by stealing their money and giving it to poor minority people. Surveys of the Tea Party found that the vast majority of them were middle class and middle aged or older. They also were largely educated people, at least with college degrees.

So what about having an advanced education disqualifies you from governing? What about it indicates that you would govern badly? We live in a representative government for a reason, our system was set up for a reason. Even back at the founding of our nation there were geographic and cultural differences that required a diverse representative body. While there is no required level of education in our country, in any other career path there is a meritocracy that favors those with advanced educations. Politicians surround themselves with staffers with advanced education. Even though there is a stereotype of educated people being elitist, is that any more true than stereotypes of black people being uneducated or Jewish people being cheap?

The fact is that when someone like Sarah Palin seeks to legitimize her own possible campaign for the presidency, she does everyone in this country a disservice. Not only does she create an atmosphere that discourages the youth in a segment of society from seeking educations but she also brings that rhetoric to the mainstream through her media exposure. The honest truth is that there are no 'common sense' solutions to our economic troubles. There is no easy answer to how to deal with financial regulations and manage energy policy in a way that promotes private sector job growth. This is not the kitchen table or the household budget for a family in Alaska, this is a matter of dealing with innumerable variables with effects both nationally and locally.

We should want people who are educated and capable in office and running this country. It's not just a matter of having someone who you agree with ideologically. It is also a matter of having someone who doesn't need basic civics lessons to understand the responsibilities of the offices in the Executive Branch, who has a proven ability to manage sensitive and difficult situations like natural disasters and economic crises. Whoever is president should be able to communicate economic policy or discuss issues facing the nation either legislatively or judicially with a sense of command and expertise, providing Americans with the appearance of being a confident leader, if not actually truly being a confident leader. Someone who wasn't just sure of their religious or conservative social positions, but someone who seeks to truly represent all people and not just a small slice of the far-right political fringe.

This isn't Alaska, this isn't the household budget of a Midwestern family, this is a varied and diverse nation with just as diverse of an economy and position in the international community. Anyone who can't proceed with confidence and authority, armed with knowledge and understanding, should not be taken seriously as a candidate. Someone who can't name even important heads of state, who doesn't have even a cursory understanding of other cultures and who can't inspire the confidence of foreign leaders and the potential investors from other nations, should not be seen as anything more than a media side-show.