Uganda

Uganda continues to give us a look at what the Christian Taliban plans for all the rest of us.  The current speaker of the Ugandan Parliament vows to push through the "Kill the Gays" bill in time for Christmas.  JoeMyGod has all the details.

If the bill passes, any homosexual activity, the discussion of homosexuality, and failure to report known homosexuals to the government will become legal offenses punishable with prison time.  "Second offenses" of any and all of these infractions will merit the death penalty.  That includes straight people who speak favorably about gays, who knowingly shelter gays, or fail to report them.

The American right wing religious donors funding and organizing this campaign to persecute and exterminate LGBTs appeal to African resentment over colonialism (a bitter irony since the religious right are the most enthusiastic cheerleaders for American imperial adventures).  They've persuaded some Ugandans to persist on this course despite threats from the European Union and the USA to suspend economic aid and impose sanctions.

Scott Lively's finger prints are all over this.

As I've said before, the religious right lost big in the last election because they are such assholes.

Schadenfreude

Joe Jervis over on JoeMyGod spent the whole week just wallowing in schadenfreude since the election.  And why shouldn't he?  And why shouldn't we?  We've listened to our enemies cackle with glee every election that decided on a gay issue since 1977 and Anita Bryant.  This year, the tables are dramatically turned.
On his blog, Jervis quotes press releases and statements from all the professional homophobes caught off guard, the Catholic prince-bishops, the evangelical autocrats, the very far right agitators and pundits, etc.

To my mind, these are the sweetest of the sour grapes.

Here is part of a statement from Scott Lively, among the worst of the worst.  As far as I'm concerned, he's as bad as the Phelps clan, only smarter and with more money and influence, more ability to do harm (just ask the late David Kato).

It’s official, the 2012 presidential election is over and we Americans decided not to downshift into Republican. Instead its now full speed ahead toward the progressive’s Godless Utopian fantasy (aka “the cliff”) with Mr. Obama and the Evil Party. The good news is that we can all stop pretending that Mitt Romney is a conservative. The bad news is that the Stupid Party will, of course, interpret their loss as a sign they were too conservative and move further to the left. The better or worse news (depending on your theology) is that the age of apostasy is more clearly upon us, which means that the return of Christ is drawing near.

And I'm sure he wonders why more people don't just adore him.  Telling the electorate that they're stupid and evil is a sure-fire way to get votes I'm sure.  But then Lively and his kindred don't care much for all this democracy nonsense anyway.



And a spokesperson for NOM tells us all that his side lost because Obama and his supporters are all terrorists.

Apparently, there are more than a few disgruntled Americans who are toying with the idea of moving to Canada. CNN is calling it 'election season bluster'. I call it flat-out ignorance. You live in the freest country ever known to mankind. As the anthem states, America is the land of the free but freedom comes with bravery, not running and hiding. Your job is to stay. And fight. For the battle is still ongoing. You leave, the terrorists win. And heck, isn’t that what the Terrorist-in-Chief wants, anyway?

To all of our enemies, thank you so much for being your own reptilian hateful selves.  Your sour repulsiveness continues to deliver for us, and this year it delivered us votes and lots of them.

Thank you all so much!

To quote the late Senator Jesse Helms after he won a narrow and unexpected re-election victory:

"There's no joy in Mudville tonight!"



EXTRA:


All of us good little boys and girls destroyed their beautiful wickedness:






EXTRA:

And what do I want to see?  Do I want to see all of our enemies crushed and humiliated?
It looks to me like they've already done that to themselves, and are setting themselves up for more.

What I want to see is our enemies finally throw off that big heavy burden of spite and resentment, and to come in from the cold.  If you're out in the freezing weather pressing your nose to the window feeling left out of the circle around the warm fire indoors, then it's because you can't or won't see that the door is wide open.

Thank You So Much!

 LGBTs won the lottery this week while our enemies came up snake-eyes.

We are not a very big group, maybe around 5% of the population.  We could not possibly have won these fights in Maine, Maryland, Washington, and Minnesota on our own.  No one's rights should ever be put up for a vote, but when our enemies did just that with our rights, our straight friends, families, neighbors, and colleagues came through for us and called their bluff.

 To all umpteen million of you who voted for us instead of the bad guys,

THANK YOU!!!!

To all of our straight families and friends who worked so hard on our behalf, and kept working-- and working harder-- despite getting a taste of what we have to live with,

THANK YOU!!!

You're the best friends anyone could possibly have!

Let's celebrate!  Have a mimosa made with pure Florida orange juice from the Florida Sunshine Tree.

Here's a little glimpse of the new normal.  What's remarkably new about this clip from Australia is not the couple becoming engaged, but the enthusiastic embrace from everyone around them.

I never in a million years thought I'd ever see anything like this in my lifetime.


And there are so many many straight folk to thank for this!

THANK YOU ALL!!!!

"Avalanche On Bull-Sh*t Mountain!"

The title of this post comes from Jon Stewart's brilliant skewering of the now famous Karl Rove meltdown on Fox News on election night.

Triumphal cognitive dissonance slammed right into the hard wall of hubris that night live on national teevee.

I saw it happen.  I stopped in a neighborhood diner on my way home from teaching evening classes late that night.  The owner had the teevee on Fox News covering the election returns.  When Fox News called Ohio for Obama, Rove wasn't the only one who couldn't believe it.  The diner owner was visibly upset and thought the news was incredible.

I have to admit that I was very worried about the Election.  I was hoping it wouldn't be a disaster.  I returned home at 11PM to find that it was all over, and that my side won the lottery.

Far be it from me, a proud liberal/progressive with ties to progressive politics that go back to my own 18th century ancestors who were Quakers or Abolitionist Baptists (along with later Texas Union Sympathizers, German Social Democrats, and a grandfather who tried to organize Western Union telegraph workers), to offer right-wingers advice, but shouldn't you folks be asking how well served are you and your cause by this kind of "news?"  Did insulating yourselves from contrary points of view and inconvenient facts really serve you at all?

No, there really isn't a parallel universe on the other side.  There are liberals like Robert Frank, Kevin Phillips, Frank Rich, and many others who've built careers trying to read the right wing id, trying to understand how one mind could hold contradictory ideas as if they agreed seamlessly; how some people could put Atlas Shrugged and the Bible on the same shelf and not see a problem.  Lots of liberals from Digby to Media Matters slog through right wing commentary trying to understand what makes the right tick.  I'm confident that there is no corresponding effort to understand the left by the right.  What few right wing books there are about the left are books like Anne Coulter's which mock and belittle the left, and couldn't care less about understanding it.

As for the right's relationship with unpleasant facts, what can I say?  Peggy Noonan and George Will were wrong, wronger, and deluded in their election predictions while the much derided Nate Silver was spot on.  Noonan and Wills relied on their "gut instincts" while Silver relied on arithmetic. What happened to that famous conservative "realism" that I heard so much about from 20 years ago?

As Digby points out, right wingers have another problem;  they can be such assholes.  Especially since 2010 and the advent of Teabaggers, right-wingers aggressively diss not only people who don't agree with them, but also those who don't look like them and don't share their culture.  The xenophobia, misogyny, and racism are barely concealed, while the homophobia is on parade.  Did the right really imagine that those whole populations that they dissed would stay home on Election Day?  It turns out that they came out in droves to vote against them, and so did their friends.


Dan Savage didn't get gays and lesbians along with their friends and families out to the polls to vote for Obama, this did:





And the gender gap, the right wing problem with women; the 'feminazis' didn't get them all out to vote for Obama.  The right can thank this guy who got not only young women to come out in droves to vote against right wing candidates, but also their mothers, aunts, grandmas, husbands, brothers, boyfriends, and  guys who just cared about basic human dignity:







And does the right really imagine that only white people can hear those racist dog whistles?






How can right wingers say they so super-love AMERICA when they hate their fellow Americans so bitterly?  The United States is not an abstraction or a revered old piece of paper.  It is the people who make it up, whose consent to live by its laws gives the Constitution its power and authority.  It is all kinds of different people who share a common history together, who are each and every one personally invested in this country's continuing success.


And then there is the future.  Which of these crowds has a future?

Romney voters

Obama voters

Aging white folk are just fine.  I plan to be among them soon.  They are living repositories of historical memory and experience.  But those things mean nothing for the future without young people who are the future.  If you are my age or older, think about that next time you complain about the kids.  And take a good hard look back at your own youth.  The way I hear some people my age talk, it sounds like we spent our youths listening to Mozart and joining the Peace Corps.  In reality, we spent our youths listening to Led Zepplin and getting high off the stuff under the kitchen sink.
No, this is not a predominantly white country anymore, but so what?  The ability to incorporate other peoples fully is a great strength of our country (as well as a great strength of the Americas in general).  We are in a much better position to face a new more cosmopolitan and interdependent world than the nation-states of Europe and the Middle East, or the very homogenous societies of East Asia.  Soon, many of our neighbors, and eventually members of our families, will look different from us and be from cultures that are not so familiar.  But they will become familiar, and we will become familiar to them.  One person's exotic meal is someone else's home cooking.

Take it from one of your lefty antagonists,  you folks on the right don't need this kind of tribalism.  And if you do, then you need to ask yourselves if those conservative beliefs that you so cherish can survive the demographic and cultural change that is already upon us.



And even after Obama became the first Democratic President since FDR to win both the Electoral College Vote and the popular vote twice without a third party spoiler, the right still doesn't get it:

It’s not a traditional America anymore. And there are 50 percent of the voting public who want STUFF. They want THINGS. And who is going to give them things? President Obama. He knows it and he ran on it. Whereby 20 years ago, President Obama would have been roundly defeated by an establishment candidate like Mitt Romney. The voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them, and they want STUFF. People feel that they are entitled to things, and which candidate between the two is going to give them things.

        - Fox News anchor Bill O'Reilly.

That means a lot coming from all those rugged individualists on Medicare and Social Security, and those über-patriots putting their money into over-seas tax shelters even in a time of war and crisis, and especially from all those financial industry roulette players bailed out with trillions of dollars in tax money with no strings attached.


EXTRA:

 For Sid:

And since the election, there's still more:

EXTRA:

Meghan McCain, a loyal young Republican, who agrees with me, that it's time to jettison the far right culture war stuff and move beyond the Southern White Male demographic.

A Big Gay Night

Last night was a big night for LGBTs.  Same sex marriage rights WON in 2 states, Maine and Maryland.  The vote remains too close to call in Washington.  Voters in Minnesota rejected a constitutional amendment to ban same sex marriage. This is a tectonic shift of the continental plates on gay issues.  It is hard to overstate the magnitude of this change.
I'm a middle aged dude a month away from turning 55 and becoming eligible for some senior discounts.  I can remember Anita Bryant's resounding victory in 1977 when voters in Dade County, Florida repealed local civil rights protections for gays and lesbians from discrimination in employment and housing by a landslide.  Every time gay rights initiatives went on the ballot, they lost; though those of us paying attention noticed that these measures were losing by ever smaller margins each election cycle.  An election victory in one state would have been more than enough to break the logjam, but two? ... WOW!

Perhaps the biggest victory of all was Obama's re-election which now institutionalizes major changes like the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell and making the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act more likely.  We were among those who had the most at stake in this election.

What's doubly satisfying is that our enemies started all of this.  They put all these initiatives on the ballot convinced that the voters would vindicate them.  Those same voters threw a bucket of ice water in their faces.

Tammy Baldwin defeated Tommy Thompson to become the first openly gay US Senator.

Iowa Supreme Court Justice David Wiggins easily prevailed against a determined effort to defeat him by NOM and the Family Research Council.

Sean Patrick Maloney, an openly gay former Clinton Administration staffer, unseated Teabagger Nan Hayworth from the US House.

Openly gay House Representative Jared Polis won a third term.

God, gods, and goddesses willing, we may be watching the beginning of the end of homophobia as a political force.

EXTRA:

Have a mimosa...









UPDATE:

AFER and Washington United are saying that marriage equality won in Washington State, but there is still no official word from the Secretary of State's office.


FURTHER UPDATE:

According to Molly Ball at The Atlantic, Election Night was a grand slam for gay rights.  The popular vote in all 4 states was a win, and by comfortable 4 to 6 point margins.

Mr. President!

Vote

Long line of people waiting to vote in South Africa's first free election in 1994

A reporter asked an old man waiting in line how he felt about standing for hours in the hot sun to vote.  The old man replied that the hours didn't matter since he had waited a lifetime for this moment.


Tomorrow we will vote our fears and resentments as much as our hopes and dreams.