More info on the DADT study from the Pentagon:
A majority of U.S. service members surveyed do not care if the law banning openly gay and lesbian troops from serving is repealed, according to a source knowledgeable with the results of the Pentagon study. Members of Congress are to get an advance look at the study Tuesday.
The number opposing lifting the ban – known as “don’t ask, don’t tell” – fearing negative results “is very small when compared to those who say it will have positive or mixed results, or no effect at all,” the source explained.
Maybe it is just me, but I get the sense that the gay rights battles are all going to end with a collective yawn, and one day we will look back and wonder what all the fuss was about. This doesn’t mean that I think we should stop fighting for ENDA, marriage equality, etc., just that I think there is not going to be a BIG SYMBOLIC victory and then the next day everything will be different. It just seems like people my age and younger simply do not understand the divisions based on sexual orientation nor care. As we become the majority and the new normal takes root, these things will inevitably change and we will begin to recognize the full spectrum of rights for LGBT citizens. I also recognize that my positions have become more liberal as time goes by, as I once thought civil unions were a fair compromise, but now will settle for nothing less than full marriage rights. A decade ago, I would have laughed at you if you said I would have donated money to the defeat Prop 8 groups.
And yes, I know this is, overall, not a very pithy or visionary insight. It doesn’t take a rocket science to predict that change will happen slowly, and I know a lot of you are far more learned on the topic of civil rights, but was this the case back then? A period of tumult, and then a new normal?
Xboxershorts
We will never know definitively but…This is one of those favored wedge issues used to bribe the social conservatives into voting Republican.
The day that gays and lesbians gain full and equal rights under law is the day the GoP becomes a truly regional player.
The GoP can raise the fuss all day long, but as long as the “promise” that they will “protect” Christian and Family values by persecuting gay segments of society, as long as that promise exists, it will be used as an election marketing tool.
Since it’s a valuable marketing tool for the GoP, it is in their interests to do nothing about it that would make it go away.
I know that’s my humble opinion and may not actually be the case, but…that’s the level of disdain and distrust I have for the GoP today.
Odie Hugh Manatee
The important question I want answered is if the military will be handing out cammo chaps. Can’t have our soldiers running around in fashion colors! That and will the face blackout be safe to apply to your ass.
Cammo chaps can only take you so far.
Bud
Thank you for these comments, John. Can I just say that I watched my brother’s lifetime of homophobia melt away inside of 20 minutes after I told him I was gay? This is a battle that was won at America’s kitchen tables, although the professional anti-gay forces are fiercely invested in promoting the idea that it’s all about out-of-control courts and weak-willed politicians. It’s a ridiculous argument on the face of it (as if it takes courage to rail against gay people when the exact opposite is true). But thanks again for demonstrating yet another example of how these things evolve.
Cat Lady
This may actually not be good news for John McCain.
Hawes
Of course change happens slowly. And while I’m fed up with Obama’s tendency to negotiate with himself, I also realize that he’s trying for generational change by making certain formerly untenable ideas more palatable. I get the wage freeze, because he wants to show that the government is just like everyone else. I just wish he’d gotten something from the GOP first.
The whole hair-on-fire over DADT never made sense to me. The difference between 1/2009 and 1/2011 really isn’t historically significant.
dm9871
One thing that occurs to me that distinguishes the civil rights revolution from the coming gay rights revolution: with the former, the law, to some important degree preceded and created important cultural changes – changes that the culture is still learning to accommodate. With the latter, it is the culture that is leading the way. I think that’s part of the reason that gay rights will be accepted with a yawn.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
@Xboxershorts: this is a good point, but I wonder if the opposite is also true.
when gays attain full rights, will they turn from social liberalism and start voting based on who offers them the biggest tax cut?
cleek
@Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century):
i hope not. having full rights isn’t the same as being free from bigotry. and we all know the party in which the anti-gay bigots will likely remain.
Bobby Thomson
John, in response to your question, change came even more slowly for African Americans. Other than the banning of the slave trade, the Civil War Amendments were effectively nullified by the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) and the Civil Rights Cases (1883), along with Jim Crow. Even after the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were passed, it took a lot of enforcement actions for them to be followed with anything approaching regularity. (And, today, people still game the system.)
Beyond the legal struggle, the cultural struggle is still ongoing. Only 25 years ago, humor based on racist sterotyping was still widely accepted on prime time TV. Beginning in the early 90s, that slowly started to change.
Gays have made more headway more rapidly on the latter front, and are finally starting to win the PR war. Pretty fast work, considering that most people consider the gay rights movement not to have begun until Stonewall. (But it seems unlikely that pace would have been possible without the earlier struggle for racial equality.)
Another difference is that, in general, politicians have been even less willing to stick their necks out for gays. Politicians have been following, not leading.
Corner Stone
IMO, with civil rights it was hard not to notice who was black. With GLBT, it’s usually a little more difficult to discern.
If you’re in a cafe, see two guys having coffee and think “homosexuals”, then it’s probably your problem.
Zifnab
There’s a lingering homophobia that I don’t think is going to go away so easily. I know plenty of friends who have no problem with gays in theory, but tend to blanch at gays in practice.
I think gay rights are going to go the way of all other minority rights. Present in theory. Questionable in practice.
Expect to see statistics in the future like “80% of gay adoption requests are rejected, many based on standards that no straight family need conform to.” Or “Children of gay family not present at home coming dance because all their invitations got lost in the mail”.
And expect a whole lot of talk about “states rights”.
Sue
I tend to agree with the general idea of this, except when I start to wonder where all those idealistic 60’s hippies who were going to change the world forever went. They appear to be voting Republican these days, or not voting at all, if the age breakdown of the recent election is any indication.
Or I start to wonder why senior citizens think it’s a good idea to preserve their own social security but deny it to the younger people. They appear to be voting for candidates with exactly that platform, if the age breakdown noted above is any indication.
My peer group, the love-one-another-give-peace-a-chance people, became the majority and look what happened – a bunch of crazy social conservatives managed to elect a bunch of crazy social conservatives. And the new normal that my elders brought into being (social nets like social security and medicaid) are now being threatened by the voting patterns of the very people who put them in place.
So I hope as you guys age you don’t start thinking funny. You might be the first.
Bobby Thomson
@Zifnab:
I think regional variations will be much more pronounced.
Punchy
This is great news for John McCain.
scarshapedstar
There was political unrest from the very day the country was founded, culminating in a civil war, and then there was a century-long campaign of murder and terror by the KKK and white Southerners in general, and then there was the National Guard and the Civil Rights Act, and then the former Confederacy began embracing openly racist Republican candidates, that brings us to the uneasy 50-50 “we hate your guts” split we have today, and now Teabaggers say we should repeal the Civil Rights Act.
So, basically, tumult is normal, because that’s how the fascist right prefers it.
And gay people should never, ever take their rights for granted once they get them.
Xboxershorts
@Sue:
The real hippies don’t vote republican and they were only a minority percentage of the total 55 million or so baby boomers. (Granted, a sizeable minority, but still a minority.)
Please try not to indulge in hippy punching, regardless of how self rewarding it may be to you. Many of us are still quite young enough to punch back.
bemused
McCain, etc are just tilting at windmills. I suspect most know this but bitter old creeps like McCain will do anything to muck up progress and get media attention at the same time.
btw, the video of McCain praising Palin and comparing her to Reagan with those strange grins and giggles was disturbing to watch. He was obviously, imo, lying but the grin and giggle stuff burbling out was surreal.
Culture of Truth
But, but, but, John McCain knows about a sargeant somewhere is still a bit iffy on the whole thing so – ALL BETS ARE OFF!
Sue
@Xboxershorts: You misunderstand, dear. Let’s just say that the members of my coop who all worked harmoniously together 20 years ago are almost all either serious Republicans now or hard-core social conservatives. I don’t know what the hell happened to them. I’ll bet they don’t even use their Laurel’s Kitchen cookbooks anymore.
Suck It Up!
@Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century):
they may get their full rights, but will it stop the Republican party from bashing them to win elections?
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
I think we’re about the same age, John–I’m 42–and I suspect that it’s our age group which is the big dividing line. I still see a fair amount of “gays are icky” in the people I went to high school, though it’s fairly evenly divided. Get much older than me, and it seems the line moves toward icky, get younger and it goes the other way. The problem, it seems, is that there’s a lot more old people who are still weirded out by gays and who refuse to get over it, and they’re an oversized part of the population. On the plus side, they’re a little closer to dying off.
joe from Lowell
@Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century):
That depends on how the Republicans talk about them, and about other minorities.
Look as the voting patterns of Jews, or Asians. There are wide swathes of the American public who would be voting for Republicans in much higher numbers, except for the Republicans’ annoying tendency to hate them.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century): Yes. Sullivan is a great example: He will vote Democrat in precisely one presidential election after gays are allowed to marry, and will then complain about young bucks buying steaks after that.
Chrisd
The “collective yawn” has less to do with the greater tolerance among the young than the spinelessness of our politicians. When you won’t take action until the majority no longer cares, your actions are yawn-inspiring by definition.
scarshapedstar
@Brian S (formerly Incertus):
I think there should be a national celebration when the “Greatest Generation” finally dies.
We can call it a memorial or a commemoration or something.
Xboxershorts
@Sue:
I apologize and stand corrected, apparently, I spend too much time on FARK where hippy punching is de rigueur…
I must be getting sensitive in my dottage…
Get off my lawn and carry on!
joe from Lowell
@Brian S (formerly Incertus): I’m 37, and I can tell you, I’m on that dividing line. When I was in high school, it would have been unthinkable for anyone to come out. When I was in college, I began seeing stories about gay kids wanting to go to the prom. BAM – that fast.
Sue
@Xboxershorts: Aww, that’s ok. C’mon over for some tofu cheesecake and red zinger tea, we’ll talk about the good old days.
Martin
NPR had a good segment last night talking about all of the issues that the military needs to tackle – between sorting out benefits and rights for gay couples across the various states (and the associated costs of adding gay partners, kids, etc. to the current menu of benefits) to possibly having to renegotiate base contracts with nations where homosexuality is de facto illegal.
It wasn’t a ‘we can’t do this because’ piece, but a ‘people really have no idea how much work is involved in this transition’ piece. This is why the military was worried about doing this without a proper study – they’re using the time to draw up the regulations and make sure that when this is repealed that they don’t have an international incident in Saudi Arabia or a gay spouse (legally married in Iowa) but residing on a base in Alabama demanding benefits, or having adopted a kid (which I believe is illegal in that state) and a chain of command that doesn’t know what the fuck to do about any of this.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@joe from Lowell: It took a little longer where I grew up, probably because it was rural Louisiana and we’re always a decade behind everything it seems. When I was in high school, it was social death (and physical pain) to have the gay tag stick to you. Twenty years later, my daughter was in a LGBT Alliance group in her high school just forty miles down the road. You’re right about it not taking long.
Wag
this is the way dadt ends,
not with a bang, but a wimper
Ross Hershberger
The Right will always use fear of Gays for political leverage, but the lever will gradually get shorter and less effective. The only ones who will all stay staunchly anti-gay are the Biblical literalists and despite appearances they’re a shrinking minority as well.
beergoggles
All this elation becomes more sobering when you realize that there are gays passing away without ever realizing true equality. Change can’t come fast enough, and its one reason we keep pushing so hard for it. Some of us would at least like to see that day before we die.
Hal
@sue
I believe they were all mugged in the 70’s and 80’s. At least according to that old joke.
Xboxershorts
@Sue:
Sure thing, I’ll bring the tea.
http://gratefulbeans.com/herbaltea.html
(Disclosure, this is a friend’s business, but the tea and coffee really is THAT good!)
Martin
@joe from Lowell: I’m the same age as Brian S. and saw something pretty similar. Same deal in HS – there was one gay kid who was effectively out, and the students simply destroyed his life. He graduated with me, and to this day I’m amazed he didn’t kill himself over what he endured. He’s the only person from HS I have any interest in meeting at a reunion. I don’t know if he’s a train wreck or the toughest motherfucker you ever met, but I remember that whatever hazing I experienced, it was much more painful to watch what he experienced.
And then I went to college and during the visitation weekend I was put up in a dorm and that night wandered over to the girls side (they were quads of 8 suites – 4 suites of one gender, 4 suites of another adjoined) and there were 4-5 girls hanging out with a guy, and they invited me over. I have no recollection of what they were talking about – just random college stuff and I picked up that the guy was a 3rd year student who volunteered to help on visitation weekend. One of the girls was also a 2nd or 3rd year student. The rest were all new like me. Along the conversation it became apparent that the guy was part of student government and very widely known and liked, oh, and he was gay. Just like that. Like he was italian or he liked classical music.
It was literally weeks between when I last saw my classmate getting hazed in high school and when I arrived at a college (church affiliated, no less) where, quite simply, nobody gave a fuck if you were gay (and it turned out, quite a sizable population was). It was pretty mind-blowing, and honestly it was one of the most remarkable feelings of relief. But I really liked that college – it was a safe place for anyone.
Hal
Speaking of whimper, I expect if DADT is history shortly, Obama will receive 0 credit for it’s end. People will scream it took to long, and he should have just used an executive order etc etc. It still never ceases to amaze me how many of my fellow gays are more angry at Obama for not “doing away” with DADT on day one then they are with Bill Clinton for signing the damn thing into law.
But it makes me wonder if Obama’s slow ways on some of these issues aren’t the better way. Now he can say he took his time, studied the issue, asked the troops their opinion on this issue [yes I know, they’re troops and he’s the supreme commander and all…] and now there really is no reason not to do away with this ridiculous policy.
I know that won’t make a difference with John McCain [his flip flop on this ranks as one of his more disgusting moments of late, btw] but with the public in general it’s not a bad argument.
rb
@Hawes: But it makes a hell of a lot of difference for individual people.
Everyone plays their role. The ‘hair-on-fire’ component of any coalition is always critical to actually creating progress; the component that plays the ‘reasonable middle’ and ultimately decisive role typically coalesces after the hair-on-fire crowd has been doing its thing for a long time. Constant, unfiltered agitation is absolutely necessary; it forces the ‘reasonable’ among us to see there is a problem. This is what makes it seem like the ending of the battle is a ‘yawn’ when in fact it is the culmination of a desperate struggle to which the majority has only recently tuned in.
I think people underestimate the significance of overturning DADT. In our (overly, IMHO) martial culture, the statement it will make is profound, and can’t come a day too soon. Outside the simple moral aspects of the issue, the secondary importance of this as a sociopolitical milestone is difficult to overstate.
Sue
@Xboxershorts: Thanks, I’ll look it over!
lacp
So now the Ancient Mariner wants DADT put to a popular vote by military personnel? As big an asshole as he is, he’s lucky that the military didn’t do things by referendum when he was a POW. His peers would have made sure that he was still in North Vietnam.
rb
Or: what @beergoggles said.
Chrisd
That’s a shame. Speaking for myself, there’s plenty of fail to go around and give everyone a piece.
gwangung
@rb:
True, too true.
Though it gets annoying when the reasonable middle constantly gets punched in the face by the “hair on fires”.
rb
@Hal: Re: Obama’s ‘slow ways’ possibly being better.
As continuously frustrated as I am with Obama’s process, I try to remember that the signal property of this approach is not that it is ‘slow’ (though that is surely a nonignorable feature), but that it is comprehensive.
Personally I feel that as this is a civil rights issue, ‘vetting’ the decision this way is bigoted, and insulting to homosexuals and heterosexuals alike. But if we restrict attention to the goal of creating lasting, irrevocable change, it is hard to beat.
Villago Delenda Est
If the military is as professional as they claim to be, who sleeps with who is irrelevant to their actual performance as military members.
One of the things that infuriates me about Colin Powell is that he’s definitely one of those “pull up the ladder!” types when it comes to gays in the military, when the examples used to support DADT have been pretty much lifted from arguments used to perpetuate military racial segregation.
rb
@gwangung: Part of playing the role. Want to do the rhetorical punching? Get out in front. :) The vanguard is taking a disproportionate share of the real-life beatdowns.
gizmo
Part of the reason that conservatives are such grumpy old farts is that they are burdened with the knowledge that the grand sweep of history is working against them. As time passes, society continually moves toward a more open and tolerant mindset. For progressives, the pace of change is way too slow, but I’d much rather be on our side of the fence– we tend to win on the big social issues, while the regressives remain stuck in the miserable role of trying to hold back the tide of change.
Villago Delenda Est
@lacp:
There’s a good reason why George W. Bush didn’t check the “serve overseas” box. He knew, somewhere in his rodent mind, that he’d be fragged if he went to ‘Nam.
McCain wouldn’t have lasted long as a grunt officer, either.
Joe Beese
Yes, someday people will look back at the pictures of uniformed DADT protesters being dragged away from the front of the White House with the same embarrassment and disgust with which we now look at pictures of civil rights protesters being attacked with dogs and firehoses.
And they’ll jeer at the cowardice of the one-term President who fought tooth and nail against the obvious tide of history.
ruemara
@Xboxershorts:
You say that like she’s wrong somehow. She’s not, and it’s not a generalization. Many of the same generation that was “give peace a chance” is now the “death panels for thee, just not for me” crowd. Many are not. Perhaps some, like say David Horowitz, are former lefties who lost it somewhere, and some were junior fascists who grew up. It doesn’t punch any damned hippie to point that out.
Martin
@Sue:
Not quite. The first boomers are just hitting Social Security now. None have hit Medicare under the standard rules. My dad was born in ’46, so he’s right there at the head of the line.
The teabaggers are driven more by the silent generation than the boomers. The average age of Fox News viewers is 65. The average age of Rush’s listeners is 67. Most of these audiences are pre-boomer. Olbermann’s average age is in the 50s – so that’s where your boomers are. The boomers, more than probably any generation are diverse. The hippies (that’d be my dad) are the ones (by my anecdotal experience) most open to more soçialist solutions. They were the ones most open to the idea of Obama nationalizing banks, to slashing and burning the executive ranks (and pay) to getting that high taxation back going. The boomers who recoiled from the hippies (that’d be my mom) are the Club for Growth anti-taxers.
What’s interesting is how much of the old battles are still being waged in their arguments. I hear it constantly – my mom will toss out the proverbial ‘they want to do this with taxes’ and I’ll think and try and come up with who on earth is actually proposing that and realize that she’s dredged up some McGovern proposal and attached it to modern Democrats. I’ve seen that quite a few times from different people (my Dad does it as well).
The opposition to climate change feels like an instinctive backlash to the early environmentalists/hippies. It’s as though every problem has been transported forward 40 years and is being fought again by the same parties that in the ’60s were protesting but in the ’10s are writing maximum contribution checks. Obama is the modern Johnson. Palin is the modern Nixon. Everything old is new again.
Villago Delenda Est
@Hal:
Oh, it’s up there, but it can’t compete with his honorless stand on torture. This guy had a chance to be an honest-to-FSM hero on that issue…someone who had been there, done that, and denounced it forcefully with all the courage that his fanbase imagines he has, but instead surrendered abjectly to his ambition and sold his sacred honor for a shot at the nomination in ’08 by sucking up to a deserting sack of shit and a draft dodger.
cmorenc
One fundamental sea change that’s occurred among a huge portion of firmly heterosexual people is that they’ve learned to comfortably disconnect their still-firm sense that homosexual-practices are still yucky to their sensibilities from any need to feel at all uncomfortable by having homosexual people in their midst as colleagues, friends, or professional relations. People have grown comfortable with the fact that to have normal, comfortable human relations with someone, it’s not necessary to endorse or vicariously endorse whatever private kinkiness they may be into with a small handful of select intimates, and further people have grown more broadly comfortable with separating the notions of kinkiness, deviancy, and social harmfulness from one another.
The other corollary vital change is that a majority of hetro people have gotten over the notion that gay people have some sort of communicable cooties that hetros may irreversible catch simply by gladly, openly tolerating gay people in their midst. As obvious as this is, it’s the true key to ending discrimination. A lot of wingers who oppose gay rights have never really gotten over their fundamental insecurities about this, papered over of course as a “moral” issue.
Villago Delenda Est
@Martin:
Well, these parallels break down fast. Obama was no master of the Senate, but then again, neither is the invertebrate clown Harry Reid. Palin is shrewd, in a burrowing rodent sort of way, but there’s no way she’s going to allow her spawn to be seen in public in a plain old cloth coat, and a little dog called “Checkers” is just not what her children, used to Gucci handbags, will settle for.
JMC_in_the_ATL
While I’ve done some GLBT activism in my time, I’ve always felt that the most political thing any GLBT person can do is come out wherever it isn’t dangerous to their person to do so. The difference in my mind between GLBT rights and other minority groups is that after a generation of coming out, the majority of the majority has a close relative or friend that is GLBT. This puts the anti-equality forces in the position not of fighting against an out-group but an in-group. It’s not “those blacks want to [insert ridiculous assertion],” but rather “These people are saying that my nephew and godson Tim who I have babysat for since he was two is a morally bankrupt pervert.”
I’m not denying that activism has its place, but I have felt strongly for years, since I came out to my high school friends in the late 80s, that refusing to remain invisible for the comfort of others is an incredibly powerful thing. It has consequences – my education and earning power ended up delayed by about a decade – but when I see the results of the collective bravery of individual GLBTs over the past 20+ years, it affects me in a very profound way.
rb
@JMC_in_the_ATL: No question.
I personally would say that coming out is itself a statement included within the universe of ‘activism,’ but that is semantic.
lol
@Villago Delenda Est:
Obama’s habit of passing legislation with hardly any votes to spare is not unlike Johnson’s philosophy.
aimai
@Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century):
Yes. SATSQ. White upper class gays will go back to voting for tax cuts and against immigration. Etc…etc..etc…
aimai
KCKev
@Joe Beese:
fighting tooth and nail more accurately describes the work of the Republican party. The president may not have moved as quickly as we would like, but this is just irrational.
beergoggles
@cmorenc: I’m sure it’s been said before, but I swear to FSM that there’s a significant (i.e. higher number than gay/lesbian)percentage of the population that’s bisexual and repressed that was/is the cause of the virulent persecution of gays/lesbians.
One side effect of coming out has been to convince the breeders that they can’t ‘catch teh gay’ like the repressed ones claimed they could. And now that the lie of that statement has caught on, it folds like a house of cards.
Hal
@Villago Delenda Est
It started far sooner than 08. The McCain of the late 90’s and early 2000’s was a guy who bucked his own party and didn’t hesitate to call out certain elements on his side when it was the “right” thing to do.
Then he saw that there was no way that policy was going to get him anywhere near the Whitehouse and that it wasn’t making any traction with rank and file GOP [and in fact might ultimately mean he would be replaced by a “true conservative], so he went 180 and became what we see today. The McCain that is now against DADT [let’s have a study! Done. Now a popular vote!], against immigration reform, against at least part of the campaign finance reform law he himself created, and most of all, unleashed Palin on America.
The real question for the history books is; which is the real John McCain? I suspect the maverick never existed, but also that the McCain we see today is also a fabrication based on what he thinks will get him re-elected.
John Stewart was right when he said McCain’s greatest ambition now is to die a Senator.
joe from Lowell
@Hal:
Some people will certainly say that. Nobody will pay them any attention.
If DADT is eliminated on January 18, 2017, Barack Obama will down in history as the Abraham Lincoln of gay rights, and a few hundred obnoxious internet weirdos will spent the next couple of decades screaming into the wilderness.
Martin
@Villago Delenda Est: I meant purely in the metaphorical sense as yes, the similarities break down very fast – but Obama is fighting most of the same battles that Johnson was, and is being attacked over almost all the same issues. Johnson was called a soçialist constantly by his republican opponents. Both had wars that were increasingly difficult to justify.
Nixon was the anti-communist polarizer – appealing to disaffected white southerners. Palin seems to be taking her cues straight from Nixon and Reagan, and the same people that supported those strategies seem to be the ones most firmly behind Palin today.
Sure, their individual attitudes and approaches are wildly different but the broad canvas being painted is looking fairly similar.
joe from Lowell
@Joe Beese:
Sure, they will, champ.
Let me give you the view outside the bubble: nobody has ever heard of you, or you pissy beef with Obama. Outside of your echo chamber, the country is divided into those who want to repeal DADT, led by Barack Obama, and those who want to keep it, led by Republicans.
And this is during the loudest, most self-pitying phase of your tantrum. A single year after DADT is repealed, the existence of your entire self-indulgent sliver of a fringe of a minority is going to disappear from history, and Barack Obama will be hailed along with Lincoln, Kennedy, and Johnson as great civil rights leaders.
Martin
@joe from Lowell: I don’t quite understand why DADT is the touchstone of this issue and not DOMA. DADT has a much more limited impact whereas DOMA is far more overarching.
dollared
John, you just defined two of the three wings of the Democrat Party, and defined its failure.
Wing 1: the economic justice party. FDR, social security, class warfare and all that, count me in. However, this wing is the least reliable – it wants someone to wage class warfare on their behalf, and Obama won’t fight. Very susceptible to tea bagging and Reagan Democrat-cy. Frequently can be convinced that Wing 2 and Wing 3 wants them to lose their jobs. Very, very male group.
BTW, you just put yourself in Wing 1 because you just said you don’t really care about Wing 2 – not that much, at least.
Wing 2: the social justice party. This wing recognizes that that the other side lives to divide and conquer, and recognizes that there really is much, much more work to do to overcome the legacy of slavery and other forms of bigotry. You just essentially said that the civil rights fight is over, so you really don’t get this Wing.
Wing 3: The environmentalists/pacifists/coastal liberals. These, plus the upper middle class parts of Wing 2, are the true limousine liberals. They will screw Wing 1’s hopes for shared prosperity and Wing 2’s need for broader economic opportunity in order to block a manufacturing plant in their backyard. They will definitely not fight to the death to end tax policy that tilts the whole playing field to favor the rich. But you can get them out if the Arctic wildlife preserve is threatened.
The formula is simple: Democrats win when they win a strong majority in Wing 1. Wings 2 and 3 have nowhere else to go. But too often the Democratic Party pulls issues and leaders from Wings 2 and 3 and nails down its 45% audience share, and then fails on the economic issues.
Pisses me off. So much at stake.
joe from Lowell
And just to rub it in your face a little more: you know what picture of Dan Choi is going to be in all the text books?
The one of him in his uniform in the Oval Office, part of the group standing behind Obama as he signs the bill.
joe from Lowell
@Martin: But that’s just it, Martin. DADT has become the touchstone of this freakish howling at Obama and the Democrats, precisely because it is the policy that Obama and the Democrats have successfully pushed to the brink of repeal.
It’s a genuinely sick dynamic.
BobN
Do not underestimate the effect of a negative Supreme Court ruling. There are so many cases headed to the SCOTUS right now. DADT, DOMA, Prop 8. The Court will take up one or more of them. If Scalia wins any of these fights, we will be explicitly second-class citizens for a long, long time.
BobN
@joe from Lowell:
I’d rather the history books show a picture of Choi chained to John McCain, but he only protests his supporters for some reason.
Fuck! A Duck
Why is Gates announcing the release of this report on the set of Weekend News Update?
joe from Lowell
@BobN:
That is so gay.
Heh.
joe from Lowell
@Fuck! A Duck:
I kept expecting to see Alec Baldwin walk onto the set in a fake beard.
Allan
The backlash thing is important to note.
When LGBTs win some measure of civil equality, whether from legislatures or the courts, there’s a well-financed wave of retribution that is brought down to overturn it and/or punish those who made it happen. And it almost always works.
There are some former judges in Iowa who can attest to this.
ye ye ye
this is all barack obama’s fault.
celticdragonchick
@Chrisd:
I agree.
celticdragonchick
@BobN:
That. We could literally be waiting for one hundred years or more to get an overturn on a bad SCOTUS ruling, and I don’t forsee a wave of congressional courage in our lifetimes.
celticdragonchick
@Martin:
Except Palin isn’t half as smart as Nixon, which oddly makes her even more dangerous in a way because her academic incompetency and rabid anti-intellectualism is married to actual political skill that Nixon didn’t really possess. They both share the same cultural warfare sense of grievance, paranoia and a talent for both making and punishing enemies.
inahandbasket
@Martin:
Actually, DOMA may come tumbling down faster than we expect (YAY!!) as a result of DADT being repealed. What will happen is that soldiers with same sex spouses who may or may not be legally married depending upon where they are stationed, will reveal to the rest of America, who revere the military, the crazy quilt patchwork of laws that say, “Now you’re married because you’re stationed in Massachusetts, now you’re not married because you’re stationed in Alabama!!” Will the state of Arkansas allow a soldier with a same sex spouse adopt a kid?
I think the public who worships the military culture, may wake up to the injustices that gay couples face on a daily basis now that that gay person is clothed in a military uniform. I think DOMA is doomed once the repeal of DADT goes through.
joe from Lowell
@Allan:
Yeah, and that’s really sad.
But, in the long view, it won’t change anything. It’s just one last howl by the obsolete while history rolls over them.