Good news: U.S. launches charm offensive to bridge new ties with some of our traditional rivals! Bad news: our new point of agreement is the need to squelch gay rights. From Human Rights News, via Sadly, No!
In a reversal of policy, the United States on Monday backed an Iranian initiative to deny United Nations consultative status to organizations working to protect the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, a coalition of 40 organizations, led by the Human Rights Campaign, Human Rights Watch, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, called for an explanation of the vote which aligned the United States with governments that have long repressed the rights of sexual minorities. […]
In voting against the applications to the NGO committee, the U.S. was joined by Cameroon, China, Cuba, Iran, Pakistan, the Russian Federation, Senegal, Sudan, and Zimbabwe.
I miss the days when we were the good guys.
Perhaps to show solidarity with our newfound friends, ballot measures for the 2006 elections are springing up around the country, concentrating on denying homosexual couples the right to adopt children. (USA Today, via Balloon Juice.) Do you think these efforts arise from a sincere desire to protect children, perhaps bolstered by studies showing that it’s better to be raised in an orphanage than by loving same-sex adoptive parents? Of course you don’t.
Election-year politics. Republicans battered by questions over ethics and Iraq “might well” use the adoption issue to deflect attention and draw out conservatives in close Senate and governor races in states such as Missouri and Ohio, says Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, University of Southern California political scientist.
The aim is to replicate 2004, says Julie Brueggemann of the gay rights group PROMO: Personal Rights of Missourians. She says marriage initiatives mobilized conservative voters in 2004 and helped President Bush win in closely contested states such as Ohio. Republicans “see this as a get-out-the-vote tactic.”
You can look back through history and see people arguing passionately in favor of all sorts of positions that today we would characterize as absolutely beyond the pale: slavery, denying women the right to vote, the divine right of kings, and so on. I used to wonder, what is it that we are doing now that will seem most embarassingly backward a hundred years from today? Major contenders, off the top of my head:
- Denial of civil liberties to gays and lesbians.
- Erosion of privacy and the right to a fair trial in the name of homeland security.
- Attacks on science and on intellectuals and experts more generally.
- Arrogant and uninformed unilateralism in foreign policy.
- A startling lack of urgency on issues such as nuclear proliferation and alternative energy sources.
Okay, that’s depressing, I’ll stop now. Happy day-after-President’s Day!
To the list of future embarassments, I would add: the Death Penalty, and its unfair application to poor and minority folks.
That is depressing, indeed. These aren’t good times for the United States. At least there is the consolation of history: however stupid we human beings can be at times, in the long run we usually bungle through. There are a lot of other good, sensible people in the United States, even if their voices are presently drowned out by the fools and fanatics.
I’m Canadian, so the gay marraige issue has been settled the right way here unless Stephen Harper is willing to break the law to appease the Christian social conservative branch of his supporters.
Homosexual adoptive parents should be limited to children of the opposite sex. Give the kid(s) an appropriate gender model.
Marriage is typically limited to two people (even in Utah and Arabia it is serial monogamy not polygamy). What logical constraints would you place on a homosexual family unit? How would you assign responsibilty and liability, especially long term, to a unit of more than two participants?
Who will pay for modifying all standardized forms requiring family information (e.g., birth certificates)? Who will be the poor sod responsible for specifying how those changes will be formatted? LAWSUIT.
“Civil rights” is a blind overall amorphous construct not an exercise in micromanagement. Individuals do not have punctiliously enumerated rights. Individuals have polymorpous appetites. US goverment has no business straying outside the US Constitution. US government has no assigned power to legislate morality, charity, education, retirement… or warrantless searches and seizures at airports. Government provides a neutral framework to define a nation. Individual snit is worked out in state legislatures, with bribes, and in fistfights.
Uncle Al,
Your list of objections to equal rights for all people has led me to ask a few questions:
(1) You seem quite concerned that kids raised by queer couples will have “inappropriate” gender modeling, despite the lack of any scientific evidence for this. Are you equally worried about the gender modeling of kids raised by only one heterosexual parent? Would you advocate that the state “limit” the rights of those parents? Somehow I doubt it.
(2) How do you place “logical constraints” on heterosexual family units? Homosexuality and polygamy are orthogonal axes.
(3) So basically we can’t have equal rights for all members of society because the paperwork would be too difficult? Are you serious?
Sean, I am also Canadian and hope this matter is settled in Canada. I doubt that Harper really cares that much and I am certain that there is not enough popular support for this kind of intolerance for a minority government to even contemplate it.
The US is very peculiar when compared with pretty much every other “First World” country. Much of it appears to be due to the strength of cultish or fundmentalist religions in the US. While there is work being done on why I don’t have the expertise to explain it.
This has influenced the politics of the US to a great degree (is there a politician in the US that could get elected if they stated openly that they were atheist?). I am amazed by the dichotomies that come about as a result of this. A country founded on principles of justice and liberty for all can’t seem to consider gay (or black or native or whatever) part of the all. There is no sense to it, it does not threaten marriage (except for people that can’t think for themselves), it does not mean the end of the world. The US is also the predominant place on this planet for scientific research yet at least 40% of the population claim that Homo was created in the last 10,000 years. This ranks 34th in the world, just ahead of Turkey.
Unfortunataely this strangeness results in serious problems like tying US aid to the receipient having an abstinence focus on birth control which means that the US won’t supply condoms to to Africa so AIDS just keeps on getting more firmly entrenched. Now it means finding common ground with murderers and human rights violators just so those pesky queers don’t get any rights.
Our treatment of animals and foreigners.
Someday the term Rovian will be used as a common adjective just like Orwellian. Unfortunately this man is real and personally responsible for untold misery, death and repression of basic human rights.
Thats what we will remember when we look back and how history will view the present era.
Actually your summary is not depressing — viewing these items as embarrassingly backward implies that we will have made great progress.
What’s depressing is the possibility that they won’t be so considered. The past six years have seen us moving in the wrong direction, and if this trend isn’t reversed then when the next century rolls around we may instead be reading our state sanctioned texts on the evils of the old system of checks and balances, shaking our heads at the inefficiency of a government that allowed for personal freedoms, and praying fervently during the mandatory church service that we will be safe from the wicked sorcerers who once tried to corrupt innocent children by teaching that the Earth is not the center of the Universe.
So everything that at some time was considered disgusting will in the future come to be regarded as normal? So does Sean look forward to the happy day when paedophiles will be regarded by the enlightened as victims of oppression? Sean will doubtless protest about the inability of children to make decisions, and some historian in 2106 will read the CV archives and marvel that such patronizing attitudes to early adulthood were once considered normal……
This is somewhat off-topic, but see Jane Mayer’s new piece in the New Yorker, about “how an internal effort [within the Pentagon] to ban the abuse and torture of detainees was thwarted.” It focuses on the courageous but ultimately unsuccessful efforts of Alberto J. Mora, the former general counsel of the U.S. Navy.
And when did you stop beating Shari Lewis, Lambchop?
LambchopofGod:
No! 🙂
But there is no Western country except the US that persecutes its citizens like this.
The support of civil rights for others has no basis in heart-felt sympathy but in self interest. Oppression deals with methodology. Who gets oppressed today is a signal to the rest of us that we are in line for the same oppression later.
The infamous writing on the wall at Auchsvitz serves as a reminder:
“At first they came for the communists but I did not speak up.I was not a communist. Then they came for trade union leaders. I did not speak up. I was not in a union. Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak up. I was not a Jew. Then they came for me and it was too late to speak.”
I could care less about a gay life style. I am celibate and find sex to be an indulgeance between emotionally crippled males and narcisstic females. I am repulsed by its entire culture including marriage. However, anyone stepping on their rights is preparing to step on me. As far as I am concerned, we are all locked up in Guantamano Bay.
What we are likey going to see is a repeat to what happened to Germany in the 1930s. Scientists will start leaving the country to resettle in an atmosphere that let’s them breathe and where they will likely invent a new weapon system that will be able to defend them against the United States..
Right now the United States is chasing many away even without the war and political repression. Scientists may be paid higher in the United States but those scientists have little free time. My niece earned her Phd in microbiology at Edinburgh and has chosen to live where scientists are offered less money but more free time..In Greece. She likes the idea of having the free time her Uncle Bob (me) had at the Post Office with 6 weeks vacation each year. Her pay is about what mine was($45,000)..and so is her free time.
Will Sean be getting the urge to move some day?