Kevin Hilke
We have a president, and irony of ironies a black one, who has been convinced that manning up on the defining civil rights issue of our age will get him evicted from the White House. Whether or not this prediction is a good one is irrelevant. Manning up is what Barack Obama was elected for. This is the job, however shabbily done by others, so he can shit or get off the pot. The longer he sits there perched without moving his bowels, the stronger the miasmic stench of his equivocating rhetoric, and the stronger his signal to Americans that with respect to gay rights, nothing has changed.
Kevin Hilke
Yes, that’s right: at the moment, both the social and economic arms of the American conservative movement are describing themselves and their efforts with terms directly out of gay chatrooms and gays’ bedrooms. Slang anchored in gay male sex is, at least in recent news cycles, the accidentally reigning metaphorical lexicon of the American far right.
Lee Konstantinou
Obama’s selection of Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural invocation has whipped up a significant amount of anger on the left. This anger is quite justified. Warren is a man who stands for the opposite of the political inclusiveness that Obama claims to be aiming for. Yet Obama’s selection is totally in keeping with the theory that has driven Obama’s whole campaign. This theory — let’s call it the Separated Parents Theory of American Politics — states that what was wrong with the last eight years of American politics — and American politics more broadly since 1968 — has been a Vietnam-fueled family squabble among liberals and conservatives. Against the Separated Parents Theory of American Politics, I present the Bad Policy Theory of American Politics. The problem with Warren is his politics. His delivering the invocation doesn’t matter because he is not being appointed to Obama’s cabinet. His invocation does matter because it suggests that Obama and those who believe in his narrative of family strife overestimate the importance of tone in their critique of the last eight years and underestimate the importance of Democratic complicity in the most horrific policies we have embraced.
Doc Edge
In arguing that gay marriage jeopardizes their religious freedom, Prop 8’s proponents have failed to make a crucial distinction. Secular marriage is the mechanism the state uses to keep track of life partners for administrative purposes. Sacred marriage is a blanket term for a number of institutions specific to individual sects and religions. Many couples are united both by secular marriage and by some form of sacred marriage, but despite their correlation, secular and sacred marriage do not imply each other. It is easy to imagine a couple that would like to be married by their church but not in the eyes of the state, or vice versa. Clearly separating these ideas reveals holes in all arguments regarding infringements of Prop 8’s supporters’ religious rights and shows gay marriage to be not an issue of religious freedom, but one of equal protection under the law from gender-based discrimination.
