Cuz I like to start my morning with a giant cup of ARRRRRGH
So. I'm merrily surfing around, checking my email, when I see "Why Mommy is a Democrat - littledemocrats.net - If you don't tell your children why you're a Democrat, then who will?" in the Sponsored Links section. Now, maybe I'm just *looking* for a reason to be pissy, but
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I'm a gay, agnostic/atheist, feminist, progressive intellectual who has no problem with taxes, government services, or taxation that takes a higher percentage of money from the rich, as I think this is the best current way to allow for equal access to financial security and the practice of freedoms that WASPs with money take for granted. I also think that public, government-run services for pensions, education, and healthcare are good things, because pragmatically, the other way has basically failed and failed hard.
People who know me personally think I'm a hoot and a half, a sweet girl, whatever. And yet they support policies and people who basically want my ass in a concentration camp scrubbing latrines before I'm gassed, if half their public rhetoric is true. And so no matter how many times I say, "I understand that you love guns and hate taxes -- who doesn't hate taxes and who among us who understands gun safety doesn't think the gun fear is a little overblown? However, the convenience of lower taxes to me is not worth being sent to a concentration camp, or more likely living a life of repressed misery, secrecy, lies, and anxiety, and being forced every day to be told I'm the scum of the earth by people who say they're morally better than me and act like raving jackals in the name of their god and call me an oppressor for saying they're being jackals. So yes, I take great offense and some fear in the fact that you think the convenience of lower taxes and no background checks at gun shows is worth my life of repressed misery and terror."
That's where I can't exactly follow this "I'm a moderate and I want unity" position. In the end, do I think I hold many of the same views as people who would identify as moderates and moderate conservatives? Yes. I think that given equal access to education and opportunity, including health care and retirement, people should be responsible for themselves, and that forming some sort of stable household unit that pays taxes, performs civic duties with a grumble or two (in the "stupid jury duty" way) that is the primary caretakers of their dependents of each other is a good thing. And that our government should follow the principle that any non-harmful act taking place in those household units is none of their damn business.
But before I can marry my girlfriend, having a joint checking account, and have a kid or a few cats, it would be good if I got those full citizen's rights that my full citizen's taxes DON'T FREAKING COVER YET. And I'm ill at the idea that I should smile and do a shuck and jive for people who not only don't think I should get the wife, joint checking account, and cat-children, I should be put in jail or forcibly re-educated, because "it might be offensive" to point out they're wrong and perpetrating a great evil ON ME. I'm even supposed to be NICE to these people or it's "offensive."
You know what's offensive? People who think I should be stoned before my eternal sojourn in hell trying to legislate me a life of misery and no bodily sovereignty based on my gay and my uterus-having status! I mean, from my point of view, I'm fighting for my right to happiness and Republicans WILL take that away from me. So there's not room for compromise. The Democrats ain't much better, but at least they don't want me dead. So I can compromise there.
There's not really a place to compromise when people want you to be miserable and/or dead. Don't you think?
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