Category Archives: U.S. politics

Bigotry is Easier Than Honest Introspection

Posted on by Ann
Lesbian wedding.

Image via Wikipedia

Brian Brown is a name you may, or may not, know depending on the depth of your interest and/or passion about marriage as a civil right. Putting aside the fact that the State’s only interest in marriage is from a contract and licensing point of view, and that marriage as a social or religious issue is purely fabricated to push whatever agenda is deemed necessary, Brown is the brainy brawn behind the National Organization of Marriage (NOM), which believes that marriage is a man/woman thing.

Brown’s group has been instrumental in interfering in states where same-sex marriage is/was/or is liable to become legal. NOM’s most recent victory was the appallingly disingenuous campaign waged during Iowa’s midterm retention vote for three State Supreme justices who happened to be presiding over the court when it unanimously ruled that Iowa’s own constitution forbids discrimination against gays when it came to obtaining marriage licenses. Brown’s group, instead of pointing out that the justices ruled according to existing law, lied to Iowans, telling them that the justices imposed their own personal agendas in place of the law to create a right where one didn’t exist.

It’s fine to campaign against politicians who are responsible for the creation of policy and law, but to attack non-partisan judges who simply clarify existing law is out of bounds. The retention vote – though most people don’t appear to understand this – is about the judge’s qualifications to read and enforce existing statute. Brown knows this. He is a Harvard grad after all and I am sure that makes him intelligent enough to know what the vote was actually about. It unfortunately also makes him smarter than most of the Iowans he needed to trick into helping him push his personal agenda of making sure that same-sex marriage is never legal in the United States. Ever.

Personal agenda?

Brown would not agree. He is quoted in a recent Newsweek article, quite artfully really, giving his reasons for taking up arms against the formation of couples and families with the following statement:

“Marriage is a public good. If you change the definition of marriage, you don’t just change it for the gay married couple down the street, you change it for everyone,” he says. If gay marriage is allowed, “then the state is essentially saying that my views on marriage, and the majority of Americans’ views on marriage, are equivalent to discrimination…It profoundly affects me if my children are taught in the schools that my views on marriage are bigoted. It profoundly affects me if the church that I’m part of is treated in the law as bigoted. And, ultimately, same-sex marriage is not true.”

And he is not wrong. Equality in marriage regardless of orientation would make him look like a bigot. It would call into question his Catholic faith. It would brand tens of millions of Americans as prejudiced.

Why is that wrong? He is a bigot. The Catholic Church is so riddled with hypocrisy that one more glaring affront to the call of Christ’s “love thy neighbor” hardly breaks its bigoted straw back.  And the American people, generally speaking, have always needed to be legally compelled to promote marginalized and discriminated against groups (like blacks and women for example) to equal footing.

They are all bigots, and apparently, not okay with owning it.

So not okay, that they are willing to campaign and protest and promote the idea of laws that are discriminatory.

All because people like Brian Brown can’t personally come to grips with that real fact that he is wrong, his religion is wrong and that the American people prefer inequality to equality, a peculiar flaw in a people so devoted to the idea of personal liberty and so very much about fairness (as it applies to them specifically – they don’t do abstract well at all).

Having taught public school at the middle school level for a couple of decades, I can assure Mr. Brown that his children will one day come to their own conclusions about his bigotry, regardless of the outcome of his efforts to save face at the expense of other people’s liberties. I was raised strict Catholic myself, and I am under no illusions about the stance of some of my countrymen or my former faith.

Waging war against same-sex marriage because it forces you to look at the truth is not a good reason to take up arms.  Society has weathered all sorts of enlightenment and coming to grips with the injustices that gays and lesbians have endured will not permanently scar anyone’s psyche.

America gave up slavery and then Jim Crow. It has, superficially at least, given up sexism.  Lady Liberty didn’t drop her torch and the Declaration of Independence didn’t burst into flames.

Change is life. Life doesn’t stand still and that’s a good thing.

Having to own your bigotry and admit that you are wrong is called “growth”. It’s actually quite good for your children to see. It’s a “teachable moment” that will catapult you in their esteem just as surely as their discovery of your clinging to outdated social injustice will damn you to irrelevance.

Brian Brown is not the only person to wake up one day and realize that the world was evolving when he would rather not, but he is someone with power enough to force the rest of us to cling to our bigoted past – and that’s not right. It shouldn’t be up to him or churches that many of us don’t belong to or hate groups that revel in the adrenaline surge of pointless and anger-filled discrimination.

Brown’s justification for his actions could have easily been spouted in the early 1960′s by segregationists or in the early 20th century by those who felt women should be denied the vote or by slave owners before the Civil War. It’s the refuge of the spiritually lazy to deny the right of society to grow up because it asks too much of them personally.

Brian Brown is a bigot and he’s fighting to keep his children from finding out.

What Do Hitler, Obama and Lenin Have in Common?

Posted on by Ann

If you are a Tea Party member in Mason City, Iowa, the commonalities lunge at one like bad 3-D, but to a person who reads, thinks for herself and happens to have paid attention during her early 20th century history class – the question should really be “aside from being political leaders during economically crushing times what do they have in common?”

And even that is stretching it.

The “change” bogeyman is nothing more than a political tool that they all use – Tea Partiers and Mama Grizzlies included -because it works.

Human beings are notorious for their dislike of change. Creatures who seek comfort and who mainly live within the confines of their homes unless some consumer need drives them out to the nearest shopping blight on the landscape, Americans in particular are living change at speeds that the vast majority of them never anticipated and weren’t raised with the coping skills to deal with.

The Tea Party then is little more than an adult temper tantrum about the loss of the American Dream rug beneath their feet. Turns out, that whole myth about us descending from hardy pioneer stock is really just a myth.

The people of Germany and Russia during WWI, which is the breeding ground for both Hitler’s rise and Lenin’s takeover, were dealing with the kinds of economic devastation the likes of which would send most Americans in search of corners to curl up in. To compare our current recession to children literally starving to death, as they were in Russia at the end of the first world war, is the height of self-absorption.

To their credit, the main body of the Iowa Tea Party disapproves of the Mason City billboard.

Yes, it’s a billboard, and it’s up for the coming month in Mason City, so feel free to mock and jeer across the blogosphere, but don’t expect it to have any effect on their views.

I know the kinds of people who fall for this type of logic. I grew up next door to them in the northeast part of the state. I taught their kids for twenty years in the public school system in the center of the state. Decent enough folk, they lead with their bellies and their sense of entitlement and a recession like the one we are experiencing unnerves them. Why? Because it flies in the face of everything we Americans are taught to trust. Behave, work hard and the middle class dream is yours.

A dream that Obama favors by the way and that Lenin would have curled a lip at.

I won’t argue with the smaller print that “radical leaders prey on the fearful and naive” but I will note the irony. And the fact that the irony would be so lost on the people who designed this billboard.

UPDATE: After being up for just one week, the Mason City Tea party billboard has been covered up at the request of the group who received hundreds of threatening messages from irate Mason City folk – who apparently all know there history better than the Tea Party people. No apology was issued and the group’s spokesperson insists that people misunderstood the billboards main idea. Um … sure, dude.

Photo by Deb Nicklay/Mason City Globe Gazette

It’s Good to be the Prodigal Son

Posted on by Ann

Not so good to be the responsible older brother though. Figuratively or literally.

Although it’s long past time to tackle this particularly big root of the current financial implosion which threatens us all, it still leaves me shaking my head and not just a little bit annoyed.

Team Obama announced yet another bailout, this to the tune of $75 billion for homeowners. Considering that this is where the problem started – a long time ago – it seems a bit like trying to stuff horses back through the keyhole of the lock on the barn door but better late than never, right?

According to Sheila Bair, who is chairman of the FDIC, it’s about time. Previous bailouts, I assume she means the ones to banks and investment houses, have failed because “We’ve not attacked the problem at the core.”

The core, of course, are all the Joe Six-Packs/or Prodigal sons who caused this mess by not being able to pay on mortgages and other lines of credit. Money is debt after all. Banks essentially lend money based more on what is owed them than the stuff that is actually on deposit with them. It’s an elaborate scam that goes unnoticed because it sits out in plain sight, pretending to be a sane idea.

Team Obama was quick to utter the right reassurances. No one will get bail out money for their mortgage if they were house flipping or bought more house than they could afford or are one of those horrid dishonest lenders who tricked people into buying more house than they could afford. 

Money will go to families who played by the rules. Oh! So the older brothers will get their reward then? Not so fast .

Thing is the “rules” during the great American housing dream of the early part of this decade clearly stated that one could buy more house than one could normally afford because houses where going to do nothing but appreciate in value. And with things like ARM’s or interest only loans – and a good job whose salary will only go up year after year -a play-by-the-rules family could buy more than they could really afford and refinance before the ARM came due using the appreciation of their home to finance it. 

Older brothers didn’t fall for that, so Prodigal sons win again. Because if you scrimped and did without – lived within your means in other words – then you are not one of those who are losing their houses right now. (Although you might be soon if you are among those downsized as a result of the reckless grasshopper like behavior of your credit-is-just-like-money thinking neighbor. Where you stand in the great Main Street giveaway is like the player yet to be named.)

I got the spiel on ARM’s when I bought my last house. I turned it down flat and still almost lost my house anyway when my late husband was fired from his job because of his illness and our income was nearly halved.

Which is my point. What about people like me? Who lost their homes through circumstances they really couldn’t control. People who really played by the rules as opposed to crying foul later when their gambles didn’t pay off as they hoped. Or the people who didn’t raid their equity piggybanks to pay off the credit cards they would just run up again or to take the family on a Disney Cruise.

What about us?

The Prodigal son’s older brother complained to their father that, essentially, being good didn’t pay off like being a screw-up who is sorry after the fact. He was sent off to a corner to contemplate his inability to be charitable.

Should people who over-extended themselves, much like the Wall Streeters and the banks, be bailed out?  Are we, the responsible taxpayers, mortgage payers and just bill paying in general half of the population just supposed to be glad the spendthrifts have seen the errors of their ways. They are victims only of their greed. They gambled on home prices rising forever and borrowed against equity that doesn’t really exist until a home is sold. They used credit cards to buy things now instead of saving up for the vacations and toys and treats. They might have been playing by the “rules” but the rules were fucked up. And deep down, didn’t we all know that?

No one teaches us in school about using credit cards, financing cars or homes. Heck, they don’t even teach us about paying taxes which is very odd for an education system that leaves little to chance by way of indoctrination into the American Way.

I know what you are thinking. The rich have been bailed out, and they knew what they were doing was wrong, so why not help out the little guy? And you are right. Why not?

Why not continue down the path of no accountability?

It’s clear that we are not worthy of our immigrant ancestors anyway. People who scrimped and saved and worked hard to get ahead. People who rode out the bad time and down turns without expecting someone to save them for themselves.

There are precious few innocent victims in the housing mess, but I will agree that there are a lot of stupid ones. People who didn’t quite understand the ramifications of the fancy financial terms, but simply trusted the realtors and the lenders when they were told,

“You can always refinance.” and that “Home prices will just keep going up.” or that “It’s never been easier to buy into that better neighborhood than now.”

Because believing that let them “get ahead” and live in that fancier suburb or take that vacation now instead of saving for it and buying it with real money and having it mean something more when they were finally able to do it without fudging around the edges.

Nothing will really be fixed by all this money that the government is tripping over itself to throw at consumers and lenders alike. The root of our problems lies within our twisted value systems and our inability to endure hard times because they are “too” hard and we are too soft.