Aug 24, 2009 0
Our Constipated Advocate
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.
There is an old joke about easing yourself into a conversation in a party: all you have to do is walk up and say “Yes, but where do you draw the line?” and you will immediately find yourself right at the heart of the discussion. The reason this is funny, and the reason it works, is that most everything worth discussing is a continuum phenomenon. Issues are rarely a matter of ‘black and white,’ yet everyone seems to have an opinion about where one thing ends and another begins. Yet in today’s politics, we are quick to throw out a final answer and call it a day. Issues like gay marriage and abortion pose difficult questions characteristically because there is no simple answer. We should approach these dilemmas with sensitivity befitting of their difficulty.
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.