Thursday, February 15, 2007
The Price of Bigotry
Over at TNR online Jonathan Cohn has a story about the very real impact of anti-gay marriage legislation in Michigan. Among other things the anti-gay bigots have made the conscious decision not to allow people to choose who represents them in health care decisions, who gets to inherit their life possessions, and who has their power of attorney, not to mention denying partnership benefits. Some might argue that these are unforeseen circumstances, but for too many this was precisely the desired outcome. Of course Tim Hardaway's recent comments about gays does not exactly inspire hope about the pace of progress on this issue.
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5 comments:
This is an absolutely horrible thing and anyone with a brain in Michigan will ultimately have to understand how this bigotted excess will hurt their state no less so than their auto industry's excesses of complacency have.
It's hard to think that anything great once came out of that state.
MUL --
This is a classic case of bait and switch -- conservatives insisted they wanted one thing rhetorically but we damned well know what they wanted in actuality and they got it.
Gay rights is the biggest civil rights struggle of this generation, and a whole lot of folks are sitting on the wrong side of history right now.
The amazing thing is that so much of this is so unconservative -- imagine taking the sexualized nature of this out of the equation and telling your typical conservative that government is going to tell you with whom you can and cannot enter contractual relationships, and that government is going to tell you whom you can and cannot establish as having power of attorney, who can inherit your property, and so forth. Stunning, yet not surprising.
dcat
I'm not sure what the legal precedents are for restrictions on the contractual relationships you mention, nor would I think that conservatives by and large have or would bother to engage the intellectual resources required for seeing the hypocrisy in that stance on a basis of conservative legal arguments, but you're right that it's a bait and switch and antithetical to the biggest civil rights struggle of this generation. The irony is that Michigan's young, Canadian-born, female governor recently engaged an initiative to brand "cool cities" in Michigan to attract young people and dissuade them from considering employment and residence elsewhere. It's initiatives like the one mentioned in your post and similarly anti-conservative measures (such as denying localities like Ann Arbor the right to decide their own, less stringent penalties for possession of cannabis) that show you how naive or deserving of sympathy or pity she - and others in her state who might have optimistically followed what came across as her progressivist tendencies - must be.
MUL --
I think you help make my point. people often justify being conservative by bitching about the invasiveness of government, and yet as soon as they see something they do not like they are more than willing to have government intervene.
I think michigan's governor is jennifer Grenholm and for a while she was the impetus behind a democratic desire to allow foreign-born citizens to run for president. Of course republicans came up with all sorts of highly principled points of opposition to that idea, Then along comes Schwartzenegger during his gubernatorial sald days, and suddenly the GOP advocated overturning the 22nd amendment and democrats made the 180 degree turn.
Ain't politics grand?
dcat
Makes ancient Rome seem like a picnic; even if perhaps only from the standpoint of intellectually consistent politics, it was.
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