Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Rich: La Cage aux Democrats

Hi. Saturday's email led off with a story about Chicago radio host
Erich "Mancow" Muller deciding to get himself waterboarded to prove
the technique wasn't torture. A reader informed me the click-ons
didn't work. I intended to pursue this, for obvious reasons, but got
delayed. Last night, Keith Olbermann had Mancow on Countdown
and showed the video. Muller, an exceptionally fit guy in his thirties
water rafts and swims and is a proud right winger, lasted 8 seconds.
He said the following: "It was absolute torture. "I would have confessed
to anything to make it stop." "It was worse than drowning. Your brain
shuts down." "I suffered for two days afterwards with chest pains and
still don't feel right." and more. Check out MSNBC's Countdown. I
just hope this opens hearts and minds, maybe inspire emulations, and
adds to the pressure for serious investigation and punishment. I also
don't believe for a second that it was limited to three individuals.
Ed


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/opinion/24rich.html?th&emc=th

La Cage aux Democrats

By FRANK RICH
NY Times Op-Ed: May 23, 2009

THE most potent word in our new president's lexicon - change - has been
heard much less since his inspiring campaign gave way to the hard realities
of governing. But on Tuesday night, the irresistible Obama brand made an
unexpected and pointed cameo appearance on America's most popular television
show, "American Idol." In the talent competition's climactic faceoff, the
song picked for one of the two finalists, Adam Lambert, was Sam Cooke's soul
classic, "A Change Is Gonna Come."

Cooke recorded it in January 1964. Some four months earlier he had been
arrested when trying to check into a whites-only motel in Shreveport, La.
"It's been a long, long time coming," goes the lyric. "But I know a change
is gonna come, oh yes it will." Cooke, who was killed later that same year
in a shooting at another motel, in Los Angeles, didn't live to see his song
turn into a civil rights anthem. He could not have imagined how many changes
were gonna come, including the election of an African-American president who
ran on change some 44 years later.

Cooke might also have been baffled to see his song covered by Lambert, a
27-year-old white guy from San Diego, on Fox last week. But the producers of
"American Idol" knew what they were doing. With his dyed black hair,
eyeliner and black nail polish - and an Internet photographic trail of
same-sex canoodling - Lambert was "widely assumed to be gay" (Entertainment
Weekly), "seemingly gay" (The Times) and "flam-bam-boyantly queeny" (Rolling
Stone). Another civil rights movement was in the house even if Lambert
himself stopped just short of coming out (as of my deadline, anyway) in the
ritualistic Ellen DeGeneres/Clay Aiken show-biz manner.

In the end, Lambert was runner-up to his friendly and blander opponent, Kris
Allen, an evangelical Christian from Arkansas. That verdict, dominated by
the votes of texting tween girls, was in all likelihood a referendum on
musical and cultural habits, not red/blue politics or sexual orientation. As
the pop critic Ann Powers wrote in The Los Angeles Times, the victorious
Allen also has a gay fan base, much as Lambert has vocal Christian admirers.

This is increasingly the live-and-let-live society we inhabit - particularly
younger America. In a Times/CBS News poll in April, 57 percent of those
under 40 supported same-sex marriage. The approval figure for all ages (42
percent) has nearly doubled in just five years. On Tuesday the California
Supreme Court will render its opinion on that state's pox on gay marriage,
Proposition 8. Since Prop 8 passed last fall, four states have legalized gay
marriage and New Hampshire is about to. This rapid change has been greeted
not by a backlash, but by a national shrug - just as a seemingly gay
"American Idol" victory most likely would have been.

And yet the changes aren't coming as fast as many gay Americans would like,
and as our Bill of Rights would demand. Especially in Washington. Despite
Barack Obama's pledges as a candidate and president, there is no discernible
movement on repealing the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy or the
Defense of Marriage Act. Both seem more cruelly discriminatory by the day.

When yet another Arabic translator was thrown out of the Army this month for
being gay, Jon Stewart nailed the self-destructive Catch-22 of "don't ask":
We allow interrogators to waterboard detainees and then banish a soldier who
can tell us what that detainee is saying. The equally egregious Defense of
Marriage Act, a k a DOMA, punishes same-sex spouses by voiding their federal
marital rights even in states that have legalized gay marriage. As The Wall
Street Journal reported, the widower of America's first openly gay
congressman, Gerry Studds of Massachusetts, must mount a long-shot court
battle to try to collect the survivor benefits from his federal pension and
health insurance plans. (Studds died in 2006.) Nothing short of
Congressional repeal of DOMA is likely to rectify that injustice.

The civil rights lawyer Evan Wolfson, who is executive director of the
advocacy group Freedom to Marry, notes that the current stasis in Washington
is a bit reminiscent of early 1963, when major triumphs in the black civil
rights movement (Brown v. Board of Education, the Freedom Riders, the
Montgomery bus boycott) had been followed by stalling, infighting and more
violent setbacks. Victories were on their way but it took the march on
Washington and Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech to galvanize
John Kennedy and ultimately Lyndon Johnson into action. Even after the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, Johnson had to step up big time - and did - to prod
Congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (now under imminent
threat from the Roberts Supreme Court).

It would be easy to blame the Beltway logjam in gay civil rights progress on
the cultural warriors of the religious right and its political host, the
Republican Party. But it would be inaccurate. The right has lost much of its
clout in the capital and, as President Obama's thoughtful performance at
Notre Dame dramatized last weekend, its shrill anti-abortion-rights
extremism now plays badly even in supposedly friendly confines.

Anyone with half a brain in the incredibly shrinking G.O.P. knows that gay
bashing will further dim the party's already remote chance of recruiting
young voters to replenish its aging ranks, much as the right's immigrant
bashing drove away Hispanics. This is why Republican politicians now say
they oppose only gay marriage, not gay people, even when it's blatant that
they're dissembling. Naked homophobia - those campy, fear-mongering National
Organization for Marriage ads, for instance - is increasingly unwelcome in a
party fighting for survival. The wingnuts don't even have Dick Cheney on
their side on this issue.

Most Congressional Republicans will still vote against gay civil rights.
Some may take the politically risky path of demonizing same-sex marriage
during the coming debate over the new Supreme Court nominee. Old prejudices
and defense mechanisms die hard, after all: there are still many gay men in
the party's hierarchy hiding in fear from what remains of the old
religious-right base. In "Outrage," a new documentary addressing precisely
this point, Kirk Fordham, who had been chief of staff to Mark Foley, the
former Republican congressman, says, "If they tried to fire gay staff like
they do booting people out of the military, the legislative process would
screech to a halt." A closet divided against itself cannot stand.

But when Congressional Republicans try to block gay civil rights - last week
one cadre introduced a bill to void the recognition of same-sex marriage in
the District of Columbia - they just don't have the votes to get their way.
The Democrats do have the votes to advance the gay civil rights legislation
Obama has promised to sign. And they have a serious responsibility to do so.
Let's not forget that "don't ask" and DOMA both happened on Bill Clinton's
watch and with his approval. Indeed, in the 2008 campaign, Obama's promise
to repeal DOMA outright was a position meant to outflank Hillary Clinton,
who favored only a partial revision.

So what's stopping the Democrats from rectifying that legacy now? As Wolfson
said to me last week, they lack "a towering national figure to make the
moral case" for full gay civil rights. There's no one of that stature in
Congress now that Ted Kennedy has been sidelined by illness, and the
president shows no signs so far of following the example of L.B.J., who
championed black civil rights even though he knew it would cost his own
party the South. When Obama invoked same-sex marriage in an innocuous joke
at the White House correspondents' dinner two weeks ago - he and his
political partner, David Axelrod, went to Iowa to "make it official" - it
seemed all the odder that he hasn't engaged the issue substantively.

"This is a civil rights moment," Wolfson said, "and Obama has not yet risen
to it." Worse, Obama's opposition to same-sex marriage is now giving cover
to every hard-core opponent of gay rights, from the Miss USA contestant
Carrie Prejean to the former Washington mayor Marion Barry, each of whom can
claim with nominal justification to share the president's views.

In reality, they don't. Obama has long been, as he says, a fierce advocate
for gay equality. The Windy City Times has reported that he initially
endorsed legalizing same-sex marriage when running for the Illinois State
Senate in 1996. The most common rationale for his current passivity is that
his plate is too full. But the president has so far shown an impressive
inclination both to multitask and to argue passionately for bedrock American
principles when he wants to. Relegating fundamental constitutional rights to
the bottom of the pile until some to-be-determined future seems like a shell
game.

As Wolfson reminds us in his book "Why Marriage Matters," Dr. King addressed
such dawdling in 1963. "For years now I have heard the word 'Wait,' " King
wrote. "It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This
'Wait' has almost always meant 'Never.' "

The gay civil rights movement has fewer obstacles in its path than did Dr.
King's Herculean mission to overthrow the singular legacy of slavery. That
makes it all the more shameful that it has fewer courageous allies in
Washington than King did. If "American Idol" can sing out for change on Fox
in prime time, it ill becomes Obama, of all presidents, to remain mute in
the White House.

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