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You are here: Home / Civil Rights / LGBTQ Rights / Gay Rights are Human Rights / Open Thread: That GOP Hobbyhorse Is Dead, But Our Collective Memories Aren’t

Open Thread: That GOP Hobbyhorse Is Dead, But Our Collective Memories Aren’t

by Anne Laurie|  March 28, 20137:38 pm| 49 Comments

This post is in: Gay Rights are Human Rights, Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality

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scalia life partner
(Jack Ohman via GoComics.com)
.
Doghouse Riley points out that the Village courtier media is scrambling to provide a figleaf, now that the GOP emperor’s new clothes have been exposed, not to mention some huge pasty-white arses:

… I don’t wanna hear about “how rapidly public opinion has changed.” Public opinion is an ass, kept around to do mule work when you people need it. Ten or fifteen or forty or fifty years of denying civil rights has gone on with your help. Hell, Ralph Fucking Reed is still on the Sundays, and if there’s a stronger argument against the existence of a benevolent God at the moment I can’t think of it. If th’ teevee news had had the balls to call this–or much else–as it is, it’s a good bet those Americans whose opinions are changing fast enough to make their heads spin, assuming their heads are involved in their decisions, would have been forced to make the choice years ago.

But we couldn’t treat gay rights as an ethical slash legal problem with a pretty straightforward answer in The Land of Freedom because the Republican party wanted to use it as an issue. Now that much of the party’s “intellectual” platoon wants out from under the clear Public Good of marriage equality has suddenly become inevitable, somehow, “no matter what the Court decides.”

Fuck that. This is getting on the right side of history before it rips a hole in your pocket. (Fuck the Clintons, while we’re at it.) Go on insisting that politicians aren’t supposed to show courage, or independent thought, if you want. Just don’t hand ’em a Bush Presidential Medal of Approval after the fact.

The Republican party cannot live without its Backwoods Bronze Age wing. At least not on election day. It’s in desperate need of cover. Unlike forty years ago, it doesn’t have a race card to play. It wants to do nothing and be applauded for its progressiveness. Talking about how public opinion has transformed itself, or how cool and happenin’ all the Youngs are, ignores who made all this necessary….

And Jon Chait, at NYMag, explains the “Next Stage for Gay Rights: Conservative Amnesia“:

It took decades for the civil-rights movement to prevail legally, and decades more for it to embed itself within the political fabric in order to occupy its current position as so obviously correct and noncontroversial that nobody is willing to admit that their side actually opposed it. The gay-rights cause is advancing much more rapidly (in part, perhaps, because the historical precedent of the civil-rights movement looms so large). A welcome, albeit hilarious, side effect is that the cycle is also proceeding at a breakneck pace. Half a century had to pass between the era when National Review’s editor endorsed segregation and its publisher wrote a cover story calling for Republicans to bring southern whites into their fold by attacking civil rights, and the present day, when National Review can pretend none of these things happened…

It’s worth revisiting Antonin Scalia’s furious dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down laws forbidding “sodomy.” Scalia argued that the law did not discriminate against gays, since it prohibited gays and straights alike from engaging in gay sex. (“On its face §21.06(a) applies equally to all persons. Men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals, are all subject to its prohibition of deviate sexual intercourse with someone of the same sex.”) Scalia clearly found the entire notion of protecting gays from discrimination in any form noxious:

Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive. The Court views it as “discrimination” which it is the function of our judgments to deter. So imbued is the Court with the law profession’s anti-anti-homosexual culture, that it is seemingly unaware that the attitudes of that culture are not obviously “mainstream”…

Scalia, it apparently bears noting, is still a member of the Supreme Court…

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49Comments

  1. 1.

    Xecky Gilchrist

    March 28, 2013 at 7:42 pm

    That conservative amnesia comes and goes – race-baiting became uncool, then it became just fine again, if with different terminology.

    Just sayin’, wait ’til we have an openly gay president to see how well that amnesia sticks.

  2. 2.

    Bubblegum Tate

    March 28, 2013 at 7:43 pm

    I’ve been saying for a while that conservatives are going through the same stages with gay rights as they did with civil rights. They’re entering the “separate but equal” stage now (“we’d be fine letting gays have civil unions with all the same legal benefits, but you can NOT call it ‘marriage’!”), so in about 60 years, they’ll be claiming that conservatives were pro-gay rights all along and in fact were at the forefront of the gay rights movement.

  3. 3.

    Tommy D Cosmology

    March 28, 2013 at 7:44 pm

    Someday they’ll deny they opposed climate science, too. “We just don’t like the way progressives play this politically.” Justice Roberts all but used the same language this week during his lame-ass attempt to justify DOMA.

  4. 4.

    MikeJ

    March 28, 2013 at 7:46 pm

    It really is amazing how quickly things have changed. I’ve been pro-equality all along, but I was one of those stupid people who five years ago thought we’d finally see it sometime in my lifetime. Like in 20 or 30 years.

  5. 5.

    Davis X. Machina

    March 28, 2013 at 7:47 pm

    @Tommy D Cosmology:
    @Bubblegum Tate:

    The GOP is not unlike what the Italians say about the papacy.

    It takes 3 popes to change anything.
    One to say ‘We will never do X — it contravenes centuries of immutable church teaching’.
    One to say ‘We will never do X, so long as I am alive’.
    And one to say ‘The Church has always done X — to do otherwise would contravene centuries of immutable church teaching.’

    So long as Peter’s Pence — or a low top marginal rate of income tax — keeps on keeping on, that is.

  6. 6.

    Hill Dweller

    March 28, 2013 at 7:48 pm

    Once again, progress is made in this country in spite of “Conservatives”.

  7. 7.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    March 28, 2013 at 7:48 pm

    I still think this could blow up big on the GOP. They can’t figure out how to talk about it, Marco and Ted have planted their flags with Huckabee. Lisa Murkowski has more or less come out in favor, I’m kind of surprised Susan Collins hasn’t, I guess she’s confused without Olly providing a lead to follow.

    Another added benefit has been the continued marginalization of Antonin Scalia. Speaking from my epistemic bubble, I get the sense that all Republicans who aren’t full-on Tea Baggers are just kind of embarrassed by the not-too-erstwhile Great Intellectual of Conservative Jurisprudence.

  8. 8.

    David Koch

    March 28, 2013 at 7:48 pm

    speaking of amnesia, remember when Elena Kagan was nominated and the Professional Left savaged her saying she was unqualified and a secret republican. Even the liberal Rachel Maddow piled on. Of course none of them have the decency to come forward and apologize and admit their error, not even after yesterday.

  9. 9.

    Anne Laurie

    March 28, 2013 at 7:50 pm

    @Bubblegum Tate:

    … so in about 60 years, they’ll be claiming that conservatives were pro-gay rights all along and in fact were at the forefront of the gay rights movement.

    Also, President Clinton signed DOMA, which is even more proof that Dems are the real homophobes, just like Sen. Byrd proved Dems were the real racists. (/snark)

    Actually, I hope in a lot less than 60 years, the Republican Party will be as powerful & well-remembered as the Whigs.

  10. 10.

    Bubblegum Tate

    March 28, 2013 at 7:53 pm

    @Anne Laurie:

    Also, President Clinton signed DOMA, which is even more proof that Dems are the real homophobes, just like Sen. Byrd proved Dems were the real racists. (/snark)

    Yes, of course. Same template all the way.

    Hell, I’d even bet that some Romney offspring will claim to have been at the Stonewall Riots.

  11. 11.

    ranchandsyrup

    March 28, 2013 at 7:53 pm

    Sometimes I wish that the rats fleeing the sinking ship could not swim.

  12. 12.

    Chris

    March 28, 2013 at 7:54 pm

    @Bubblegum Tate:

    Exactly. I’ve said it too and agree completely.

  13. 13.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    March 28, 2013 at 7:54 pm

    @Anne Laurie: Colbert had a great gotcha on O’Reilly, who was trying to act indignant about Clinton’s ‘opportunism’, then O’Reilly braying about marrying ducks and goats.

  14. 14.

    Litlebritdifrnt

    March 28, 2013 at 7:56 pm

    my godfather was gay back in 1960 when it was still a pariah. i
    adm
    ire him for that. apologies for my typing but i reckon a glass of wine a cat’s butt and a laptop keyboard do not mix well.

  15. 15.

    Baud

    March 28, 2013 at 7:57 pm

    @Litlebritdifrnt:

    LOL. Only two of those things work well together.

  16. 16.

    Baud

    March 28, 2013 at 8:00 pm

    The sad part isn’t that Republicans will claim that they were always pro-gay, it’s that a significant number of reporters and the public will agree with them.

  17. 17.

    different-church-lady

    March 28, 2013 at 8:01 pm

    @Litlebritdifrnt:

    a glass of wine a cat’s butt and a laptop keyboard

    …and thou.

  18. 18.

    Chris

    March 28, 2013 at 8:01 pm

    @Baud:

    You said it.

    “Wired for Republicans” is one of the truest phrases ever said about our politics.

  19. 19.

    Cygil

    March 28, 2013 at 8:07 pm

    Great, except Scalia’s “life partner” should be a giant spider, wearing a mortification celice, with Opus Dei written on it. Why no one is ever willing to note that Scalia and Thomas are both obviously stealth Opus Dei members is a mystery to me.

  20. 20.

    Comrade Mary

    March 28, 2013 at 8:09 pm

    @Litlebritdifrnt: Is … is that you, archy?

  21. 21.

    PsiFighter37

    March 28, 2013 at 8:09 pm

    @Baud: In this day and age, there’s too much of a public record for them to claim otherwise. They won’t get away with it.

  22. 22.

    Suffern ACE

    March 28, 2013 at 8:12 pm

    We haven’t actually finished with this round. Why are we saying this isn’t controversial? I think we’re ordering the fifth round when the third hasn’t yet come to the table.

  23. 23.

    dmbeaster

    March 28, 2013 at 8:13 pm

    @Bubblegum Tate:

    so in about 60 years, they’ll be claiming that conservatives were pro-gay rights all along and in fact were at the forefront of the gay rights movement.

    As in, “some of my best friends were gay” which seems so true for the party of closet cases.

  24. 24.

    Baud

    March 28, 2013 at 8:15 pm

    @PsiFighter37:

    The public record is there, but the people gots to read it.

  25. 25.

    Roger Moore

    March 28, 2013 at 8:20 pm

    @Bubblegum Tate:

    Hell, I’d even bet that some Romney offspring will claim to have been at the Stonewall Riots.

    They’ll just be careful not to mention which side they were on.

  26. 26.

    Chris

    March 28, 2013 at 8:22 pm

    @PsiFighter37:

    There’s plenty of public record for civil rights too.

    William F. Buckley’s ravings in the National Review. Barry Goldwater’s stance against the Civil Rights Act. Jerry Falwell’s origins as a white supremacist preacher warning that “integration will destroy our race.” Pat Robertson’s defense of Apartheid South Africa in the eighties, stating that “one man one vote” “unrestricted” democracy would not be “wise.” Paul Weyrich’s admission that Southern fundiegelicals had no interest at all in his abortion-based Religious Right coalition until after the Carter administration’s offensive against all-white “Christian” institutions in the South. Trent Lott’s statement, barely a fucking decade ago, that America should’ve followed Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat candidacy and then we wouldn’t have “all these problems.”

    There are piles and piles of public record out there, but it won’t matter; they’ll swear it’s not true and the media will consider it partisan and mean to fact-check them with their own words. We’re talking about people who reinvented themselves as a “oh yeah, I was TOTALLY protesting the spending in the Bush years!” “Tea Party Movement” within twelve months, and most media outlets won’t even call them on THAT bit of bullshit.

  27. 27.

    Tonal Crow

    March 28, 2013 at 8:22 pm

    “Conservative amnesia” is just another form of Republican propaganda. They will say anything to anyone — whether it’s true, false, unknown, or unknowable, and whether it’s consistent with or utterly contradictory to something they said in the last sentence — if they think it’ll convince someone to support them.

    That is, bullshit is the alpha and the omega of Republican argument.

  28. 28.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    March 28, 2013 at 8:27 pm

    @efgoldman: That is, any Republican who doesn’t hold elective office and has no power.

    The first part is probably true, but I think a lot of financiers and fixers are embarrassed by him, and very nervous about how this is going to play out.

  29. 29.

    SiubhanDuinne

    March 28, 2013 at 8:31 pm

    @different-church-lady: Win

  30. 30.

    PsiFighter37

    March 28, 2013 at 8:32 pm

    Question for you all – it seems like the Senate is going to end up passing some potentially touching legislation that the House will not vote on. Does taking politically contentious votes at this point not matter as much now, because the Democrats will simply point at the House and say that they’re not going their job?

    Just wondering…because I’m not sure what the smart thing from a purely political standpoint is.

  31. 31.

    SiubhanDuinne

    March 28, 2013 at 8:34 pm

    @Comrade Mary:

    wotthehell wotthehell

  32. 32.

    Baud

    March 28, 2013 at 8:36 pm

    @PsiFighter37:

    I don’t understand what you’re asking.

  33. 33.

    Suffern ACE

    March 28, 2013 at 8:37 pm

    @Chris: yep. I believe those tea partiers got their first exposure not against health insurance for the uninsured, but from protesting mortgage relief and cram downs. But I bet they remember themselves as anti-bank bailout activists.

  34. 34.

    Suffern ACE

    March 28, 2013 at 8:45 pm

    Ummm. As part of my continuing education, I’m reading a book called “the drunken botanist”, which is my kind of science. I bought a bottle of drambouie as it was mentioned in the book and it is one of many liqueurs I’ve never had before. It would not be science without empirical observations. I’ve already tested one hypothesis based on the theory that I would like it. But I need a few more tests.

  35. 35.

    PsiFighter37

    March 28, 2013 at 8:46 pm

    @Baud: Basically, I feel like the gun control legislation could end up like the cap and trade bill – we pass it, with great political expense, through one house, just to see it go nowhere in the other, and give the more endangered Senators a tough vote. But are Democrats more confident that they can use the cudgel of inaction against the GOP more effectively now? I.e. does view of GOP doing nothing hurt them more politically than it hurts Democrats to take a tough (even if it shouldn’t be) stand on gun control?

  36. 36.

    Baud

    March 28, 2013 at 8:54 pm

    @PsiFighter37:

    It’s hard to know how it will play politically, especially in the more conservative states represented by Democrats. Senators could always choose to vote down the bill, and I think that threat is why the bill is constantly being watered down.

    Unfortunately, being a Democratic politician means that about 99% of every decision you make will be deemed either coweredly or stupid by someone.

  37. 37.

    RaflW

    March 28, 2013 at 9:51 pm

    @Baud: “The public record is there, but the people gots to read it.”

    YouTube or it’s equivalent in the decades ahead, clips of Colbert, and Daily Show, etc…

  38. 38.

    JoyfulA

    March 28, 2013 at 10:03 pm

    @Cygil: Thomas became an Episcopalian when he divorced his first wife and remarried.

  39. 39.

    Lurking Canadian

    March 28, 2013 at 10:19 pm

    @JoyfulA: Who does he think he is, the king of England?

  40. 40.

    Patricia Kayden

    March 28, 2013 at 10:20 pm

    “It took decades for the civil-rights movement to prevail legally, and decades more for it to embed itself within the political fabric in order to occupy its current position as so obviously correct and noncontroversial that nobody is willing to admit that their side actually opposed it.”

    Chait is incorrect. Rand Paul publicly admitted to being against the Civil Rights Act and look at how the Repubs have tried to gut the Voting Rights Act.

  41. 41.

    The Fat Kate Middleton

    March 28, 2013 at 10:21 pm

    @Tonal Crow:

    [B]ullshit is the alpha and the omega of Republican argument.

    I am so using this.

  42. 42.

    jefft452

    March 28, 2013 at 10:26 pm

    @PsiFighter37: “I.e. does view of GOP doing nothing hurt them more politically than it hurts Democrats to take a tough (even if it shouldn’t be) stand on gun control?”

    In general, my take is taking a stand is always smarter
    Being in favor of spending 50 million to build a bridge across the river can be a popular issue
    Opposing spending 50 million to build a bridge across the river can be a popular issue
    Being in favor of spending 25 million to build a bridge half way across the river – not so much

    In the specific, I think times have changed
    We used to get killed by our blue dog problem, for example Blanche Lincoln’s anti-union record turned off pro worker voters, yet didn’t gain a single vote from the “looters & moochers” crowd

    On gun control, same sex marriage, the war on women, immigration, (and a lot of other things) the Republicans now have this problem
    There are not enough wingnuts for red meat to the base to win elections,
    trying to moderate loses the wingnut votes without picking up any of the mushy middle

    For the past 30 yrs, no matter blue that dog was, people saw Jane Fonda
    I think in the next 30 yrs, no matter how compassionate that conservative is, people will see Todd Akin

  43. 43.

    Southern Beale

    March 28, 2013 at 10:43 pm

    Wow, How did I never hear about this story from 2011?

    In a 1994 Senate debate with Ted Kennedy, Mitt Romney revealed a startling chapter from his past: A close relative had died many years earlier in a botched illegal abortion, shaping Romney’s stance in favor of safe and legal access to abortion for all women. But in the many years since that revelation, even as Romney flipped his position and became an ardent opponent of legal abortion, the details of his young relative’s story, including even her name, have never been reported.

    The relative he was referring to back in ’94, Salon has learned, was a Detroit woman named Ann Keenan. She was the sister of Romney’s brother-in-law and died at the age of 21 in 1963, a full decade before Roe v. Wade. While much of what happened remains murky, an investigation by Salon has uncovered never-reported details about her life and death, including: how she died (an infection); that her grief-stricken parents asked for memorial donations to be made to Planned Parenthood; and that the family apparently wanted to keep the death quiet because Romney’s politically ambitious father, George, was then governor of Michigan.

    I’ve never heard this story before. How did I miss it?

  44. 44.

    Bobby Thomson

    March 28, 2013 at 11:16 pm

    I’ve never heard this story before. How did I miss it?

    The Obama campaign had no interest in publicizing it because they decided to go with the Right Wing Uncle Moneybags narrative instead of the Flip Flopping Shapeshifter narrative, and this story would have taken things off message.

    And the political press are a bunch of lazy, stupid assholes who don’t do their own work.

  45. 45.

    Joey Maloney

    March 29, 2013 at 1:36 am

    @Xecky Gilchrist: Just sayin’, wait ’til we have an openly gay president to see how well that amnesia sticks.

    OMG, if Barney Frank were 30 years younger…I think I just jizzed myself thinking of all the head-asplodery that would result.

  46. 46.

    marshall

    March 29, 2013 at 2:17 am

    Why no one is ever willing to note that Scalia and Thomas are both obviously stealth Opus Dei members is a mystery to me.

    Thomas goes to Truro Episcopal Church near Fairfax Courthouse right here in the Virginia suburbs of DC., so I don’t think he is in Opus Dei.

  47. 47.

    Fred

    March 29, 2013 at 9:22 am

    I’m optimistic but as Mr. Wolf in “Pulp Fiction” said, “Let’s not all start sucking each others’ dicks just yet.”

  48. 48.

    ...now I try to be amused

    March 29, 2013 at 9:44 am

    Scalia argued that the law did not discriminate against gays, since it prohibited gays and straights alike from engaging in gay sex.

    “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” — Anatole France

  49. 49.

    coloradoblue

    March 29, 2013 at 10:57 am

    Scalia, it apparently bears noting, is still a member of the Supreme Court…

    But not, apparently, a member of the human race.

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