Culture Warriors category archive

I find it noteworthy how many persons who love to thump the Bible seem unable to comprehend the frightful implications of taking it literally.

Via Job’s Anger.

I don’t follow Daily Kos very closely, but I must say, this post is a gem.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., suggests that one skirmish in the culture wars is all but over. A snippet:

And here, a little context might be instructive. Twenty years ago, you recall, we were essentially arguing over the right of gay people to exist. The debate then was over whether they could serve in the military, adopt children, be fired or denied housing because of their sexuality. Ten years ago, public opinion on most of those issues having swung decisively, we were fighting over whether or not they could get married. Ten years later, that point pretty much conceded, we are arguing over who should bake the cake.

The very parameters of the debate have shifted dramatically to the dreaded left. Positions the GOP took proudly just 20 years ago now seem prehistoric and its motivations for doing so, threadbare. This is not about morality, the Constitution or faith. It never was.

In a related item, a letter-writer to the Miami Herald suggests, “Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander.”

Jon Stewart on Indiana, below the fold in case it autoplays.

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I predict that this will not work out as the plaintiffs hope. Once you open Pandora’s box, you cannot close it again; when discovery starts, all bets are off.

In related news, Rutgers (when I was in college, we knew it as “Rotgut,” but that was a long time ago–misty water-colored memories and all that) bans frat and sorority parties, because of frats and sororities.

A James Doblin points out, you don’t know how bad it feels to be a hater (emphasis added).

The news from Indiana keeps changing. State legislators have come up with a fix for a law that was supposedly about restoring religious freedom. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence signed off on the law last week, claiming it had nothing to do with discriminating against gays and lesbians. He even went further, saying tolerance was a two-way street.

Minorities understand that completely – it means you can get run over in both directions by intolerant people. Pence wanted America to believe people who protest being the objects of discrimination do not understand what it feels like being the bigot hurling the insults.

Follow the link for the rest of his article, which bends in interesting directions.

E. J. Dionne, in a much longer column about the attempt to remake freedom from discrimination into freedom to discriminate, observes that appearances have become a new imperative.

As controversy engulfed Indiana over its religious liberty law that would give legal recourse to those who discriminate against gays and lesbians, leaders of North Carolina, which has one of the most conservative state governments in the country, were getting cold feet about passing a comparable statute.

“I think we need to show that if we approve this bill, that it will improve North Carolina’s brand,” said Tim Moore, the Republican Speaker of the state House of Representatives. “Anything we do, we have to make sure we don’t harm our brand.”

A new commandment now trumps some of the others: Thou shalt not spoil the brand.

North Carolina has a brand? If so, I suspect it’s not what Mr. Moore thinks it is.

I do think an argument can be made that the decline and fall began when “branding” replaced “quality” as management consultants’ favorite con. Too many folks concluded that, if you have “brand,” to hell with “quality.”

Christianist twits.

No self-awareness, no self-awareness whatsoever.

“In the Ten Commandments, it says you can’t commit adultery,” reporter Gary Tuchman said to the florist, Melissa Jeffcoat, adding, “It says you need to honor your father and mother.”

When he asked whether she would provide flowers for an adulterer or someone who had “dishonored” their parents, she replied affirmatively.

“Well, why would you serve them but not serve someone who is gay?” Tuchman asked.

“It’s just a different kind of sin to me,” Jeffcoat replied. “I just don’t believe in it.”

Methinks “different kind of sin” is the new way of saying “I think it’s icky.”

I could have more fun with this (e.g., “a sin that I would never do”), but I’ll stop now.

Noz considers the Cotton test.

Many years ago I was on a business trip to Chicago. I was staying at a downtown Chicago hotel not far from what was then known as the Sears Tower, because the hotel was just a few blocks from Chicago Union Station, the site of my training gig. In the hotel bar, I overheard two dressed-for-success yuppies in their power ties (today they would no doubt be “hipsters”) discussing rumors of impending layoffs at Sears HQ, which, surprisingly enough, was in the Sears Tower.

After a bit of back forth, one of them put down his drink, looked up determinedly, and said resolutely, “I know this. No matter what happens, I’m never going back to Indiana.”

Upyernoz thinks that the who-shot-john over Indiana’s “yes you can mistreat folks because they are gay” law indicates the Republican alliance is starting to splinter.

Not long ago, the business community would not have cared if a state passed a law intended to promote discrimination against gay people. At best it was too controversial for them to touch. At worst, they didn’t think it was controversial to hate gays but they did have a sense that their customers would find anything related to gay people to be icky. For pro-business conservative gay issues were a politically safe bone to toss to their social conservative base.

What has happened in Indiana in the past week shows that does not work anymore.

I hope he’s right, but I expect he’s being optimistic. One constant in American politics is that hate sells. Hate has been the means to fame, fortune, and influence for a flock of preachers and pols, and the market seems unsated.

Hate has sold in the past, it sells today, and it will sell tomorrow.

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.