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.