March, 2015 archive

Writing about Indiana’s recent decision to give legislative sanction to sanctimonious bigots, Emily Mills wonders what would happen if the cake were turned upside down (emphasis added).

It’s not just LGBTQ people who will be affected. The language is general enough that really anyone could decide to violate the Civil Rights Act and claim that it’s all part of exercising one’s religious “freedom.”

That’s the biggest problem with laws like this one. The people who write them do so with an intensely myopic view of the scope, one focused almost solely on their own personal pet peeves, instead of seeing the way it could be applied right back at them. Say a gay couple owns a bakery, and decides they don’t want to serve the Republican couple that comes in to have a wedding cake made. The proprietors could claim that serving Republicans violates their own religious beliefs. Turnabout is fair play. Except when it’s not.

The right-wing has changed “freedom from discrimination” into “freedom to discriminate.” Quite clever, really, in all its vileness.

Via Raw Story.

Steven D, considering what right-wingers mean when they say, “I want my country back,” recalls an incident from his growing up:

As a child born in the middle of the Fifties in the South, I knew at an early age that some people were considered inferior to me. The signs were all around – literally. I remember once when I was three or four when a white woman stopped me as I approached a drinking fountain, thirsty after being dragged around on a hot summer day by my mother on one of her shopping trips to Raleigh’s downtown. The woman, politely, but sternly, took hold of my arm, and told me I couldn’t use that fountain because it was for “colored people.”

I’ve a similar story, which I’ve told before, but shall tell again.

When I was about ten, my mother, brother, and I were taking the bus to visit my grandmother in South Carolina, several years before the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. During a short stop in Raleigh, North Carolina, I walked into the the wrong waiting room–the “colored” waiting room. Conversation stopped; everyone looked at me.

I have never before or since felt so out-of-place and alone.

When the right says, “I want my country back,” what it demands is the ability to inflict that same feeling–the alone-ness, the out-of-placed-ness–on everyone, anyone, just because they can.

Follow the link and read Steven D’s entire post.