Uneasy Rhetoric

I’m too tired to write up a whole new screed about how I feel about the election. Instead, I’m going to excerpt some emails and other postings I’ve made to various folks.

First:

I had my moment of defeat, but you know me, I’m at heart a believer in American democracy and in the ultimate victory of progress. Right now we just have to deal with a lot of fear. Terrorism. Men having sex with other men.

CNN did something interesting in its coverage of the 11 states that had anti-gay-marriage initiatives on the ballot. Every time they showed a news clip on Headline News, they showed a different couple at the altar, and in every case the couple was a lesbian couple, and in every case they were lipstick lesbians. The kind who get hit on in straight bars. I actually had to wonder about CNN’s choice of images because as we all know, and you’ll pardon me for saying this, the whole motivation for the anti-gay marriage initiative is fear of butt fucking.

Why am I making such a big deal out of this? Because I think Karl Rove brilliantly used gay marriage as the single largest wedge issue possible to bring down Kerry. If the Swift Boat deceit was the public gambit, gay marriage was the grassroots gambit - a strategy spread from door to door and helped along by malicious ballot initiatives.

Second (in reference to this column in the Oregonian):

Oh God, I could cry. That is much too good. Duin is right; we need to take off the gloves and do for the left what the Republican’s did for the right.

But, that being said, it is a tradition to talk about uniting the sides after an election. Anybody who pays any attention knows it’s just hot air. But the Dems do seem to take it a little too seriously (does that mean they aren’t paying attention?).

Every progressive in America should read that column. Twice.

Third:

I’m less optimistic about society continuing to open up (in the short term). Right now there is a lot of tension between the political movement within the Bush administration and the public at large, but it’s an unspecific tension that had no real effect on the electorate. We won’t, as a society, realize until it is too late that our very openness is in jeopardy until something major happens. The little chipping aways that the Administration has been doing to our civil liberties and to government transparency — hallmarks of the “American Way” — and the slow draining down of the moat separating church from state are coming gradually enough, and are couched in enough fear and misinformation (yet another topic for another time - we are now over informed, so much so that I think we’re having trouble splitting fact from fantasy) that they’re getting away with it.

I hate to use this phrase, but since you brought it up I do think there’s a “culture war” brewing that will pit those who are fighting for a continuing opening of society against those who feel threatened by that openness. I think we’re going to see a resurrection of Limbaugh’s rants against “radical humanists,” although it will be couched in a new term that may be more explicitly religious.

Maybe “agnostic” will become the new “liberal.” After all, agnostics like me are flip-floppers right?