A victory for hate in California
So, I haven't talked about this much here because it wouldn't do much good -- most of you are not in California and so not directly part of the issue. But my friends here have been hearing it from me for weeks.
The victory for Obama last night felt like emerging from a long nightmare into daylight. I went to bed on the 3rd feeling like it was imminent, and feeling like a kid on Christmas Eve for the first time since I was a kid on Christmas Eve. But the shadow over all of this for many, many Californians is prop 8, and I am absolutely furious with a slim majority of Californians right now. I love this state, and for the most part I love its politics, but it is also, as we apparently need to be reminded, a state that is capable of periodic moments of total insanity, and in this case, overwhelming hypocrisy so intense it makes reasonable people ill.
What most people and probably even most Californians don't know is that California has an ugly history of racism, xenophobia, and hatred having to do, among other things, with its proximity to Asian countries overseas and therefore immigration. This is deja vu all over again for California, not learning from the past, mixed in with a good old fashioned dose of lockstep religious mania.
The biting irony here is that a solid fifth of the population voted for Obama and for proposition 8.
Obama is not just the first "black" president, he's also the first multiethnic president -- as black as he is white, and vice versa. Had Obama's parents lived in California before 1948 -- within my father's lifetime -- it is likely Obama would not exist. Not just "not be elected president" -- not goddamn exist. Had my parents met before 1948, I would not exist.
If you were to suggest to a person on the street right now that we should re-enact the anti-miscegenation laws of the 40s and prior, you would be labeled a racist, a hateful, fearful person with backward ideas. It is generally agreed upon now in all but the far edges of the lunatic fringe that the internment of Japanese Americans during WW2 was A Bad Idea, a notion sprung from fear-mongering, deceit, and racial hatred stemming back decades on the part of proud white farmers who saw their livelihoods threatened by the efficiency of the Japanese immigrants. These acts, now deemed among the most severe and deplorable civil rights violations inflicted by the United States upon its citizens, had their roots in anti-miscegenation xenophobic them-and-us laws that had been brewing in California long before.
This is. The same. Goddamn. Thing.
The very slight victory here is that this was a much tougher fight than prop 22. The pro-8 lobby had to throw millions of dollars into deceiving the public into thinking that prop 8 was something other than telling two people "for the love of God, don't fall in love". They had to yank children and schools into the picture, and it took the schools too long to organize into proper insulted fury and debunk their lies.
The greatest and most biting hypocrisy in the center of these ads was the use of a news story following the students of a lesbian teacher, with parental permission, attending her wedding as ammunition proving that shutting down prop 8 would cause gay marriage to be taught in schools. Never mind that not only are schools not required to teach marriage of any kind (and generally avoid doing so) but also are utterly unaffected by the passing or failure of prop-8 on this issue -- the religious right (and don't even get me started on the Mormons) had to pull something out of their hat at the last minute, because prop 8 was not doing well in the last weeks before the election. They were running scared and desperate; Californians were catching on. But the true hypocrisy had to do with the kids themselves, the ones that were used without their (or their parents') permission in the ad. Parents responded to the ad, demanding that it be pulled from the airwaves, as images of their children had been used for political purposes against their will. These parents had given permission for their kids to attend their teacher's wedding, and now were being used in advertising aimed at telling them they were wrong in what they wanted to teach their children. So for the pro-8 lobby, we need to protect children from being exposed to gay marriage, but it's okay to use other people's kids as political tools in total violation of their privacy and the decision of their parents to educate their own children in the manner of their choosing. Clearly some kids need to be protected, others need to be used as political mules in a distraction tactic because you can't face up to the fact that most Californians don't want to tell their fellow citizens who they can and cannot marry.
So thanks, 51%, for showing that you really are no different than the gun-toting book-burning polar-bear-drowning Palin mob that you so righteously voted down in the general election. Have fun explaining to your children and grandchildren how you willfully legislated discrimination into the California Constitution so that you could have a little convenience in shirking your parental duties to explain to your children the world that they live in. Thank you for voting with your fear. Now please die out quietly so that the children you think you were trying to protect can recover from the emotional abuse of your hatred and join the rest of us in the 21st century.
Race is an illusion. Gender is a more persistent illusion. People are people. And we have a long way to go.
The victory for Obama last night felt like emerging from a long nightmare into daylight. I went to bed on the 3rd feeling like it was imminent, and feeling like a kid on Christmas Eve for the first time since I was a kid on Christmas Eve. But the shadow over all of this for many, many Californians is prop 8, and I am absolutely furious with a slim majority of Californians right now. I love this state, and for the most part I love its politics, but it is also, as we apparently need to be reminded, a state that is capable of periodic moments of total insanity, and in this case, overwhelming hypocrisy so intense it makes reasonable people ill.
What most people and probably even most Californians don't know is that California has an ugly history of racism, xenophobia, and hatred having to do, among other things, with its proximity to Asian countries overseas and therefore immigration. This is deja vu all over again for California, not learning from the past, mixed in with a good old fashioned dose of lockstep religious mania.
The biting irony here is that a solid fifth of the population voted for Obama and for proposition 8.
Obama is not just the first "black" president, he's also the first multiethnic president -- as black as he is white, and vice versa. Had Obama's parents lived in California before 1948 -- within my father's lifetime -- it is likely Obama would not exist. Not just "not be elected president" -- not goddamn exist. Had my parents met before 1948, I would not exist.
If you were to suggest to a person on the street right now that we should re-enact the anti-miscegenation laws of the 40s and prior, you would be labeled a racist, a hateful, fearful person with backward ideas. It is generally agreed upon now in all but the far edges of the lunatic fringe that the internment of Japanese Americans during WW2 was A Bad Idea, a notion sprung from fear-mongering, deceit, and racial hatred stemming back decades on the part of proud white farmers who saw their livelihoods threatened by the efficiency of the Japanese immigrants. These acts, now deemed among the most severe and deplorable civil rights violations inflicted by the United States upon its citizens, had their roots in anti-miscegenation xenophobic them-and-us laws that had been brewing in California long before.
This is. The same. Goddamn. Thing.
The very slight victory here is that this was a much tougher fight than prop 22. The pro-8 lobby had to throw millions of dollars into deceiving the public into thinking that prop 8 was something other than telling two people "for the love of God, don't fall in love". They had to yank children and schools into the picture, and it took the schools too long to organize into proper insulted fury and debunk their lies.
The greatest and most biting hypocrisy in the center of these ads was the use of a news story following the students of a lesbian teacher, with parental permission, attending her wedding as ammunition proving that shutting down prop 8 would cause gay marriage to be taught in schools. Never mind that not only are schools not required to teach marriage of any kind (and generally avoid doing so) but also are utterly unaffected by the passing or failure of prop-8 on this issue -- the religious right (and don't even get me started on the Mormons) had to pull something out of their hat at the last minute, because prop 8 was not doing well in the last weeks before the election. They were running scared and desperate; Californians were catching on. But the true hypocrisy had to do with the kids themselves, the ones that were used without their (or their parents') permission in the ad. Parents responded to the ad, demanding that it be pulled from the airwaves, as images of their children had been used for political purposes against their will. These parents had given permission for their kids to attend their teacher's wedding, and now were being used in advertising aimed at telling them they were wrong in what they wanted to teach their children. So for the pro-8 lobby, we need to protect children from being exposed to gay marriage, but it's okay to use other people's kids as political tools in total violation of their privacy and the decision of their parents to educate their own children in the manner of their choosing. Clearly some kids need to be protected, others need to be used as political mules in a distraction tactic because you can't face up to the fact that most Californians don't want to tell their fellow citizens who they can and cannot marry.
So thanks, 51%, for showing that you really are no different than the gun-toting book-burning polar-bear-drowning Palin mob that you so righteously voted down in the general election. Have fun explaining to your children and grandchildren how you willfully legislated discrimination into the California Constitution so that you could have a little convenience in shirking your parental duties to explain to your children the world that they live in. Thank you for voting with your fear. Now please die out quietly so that the children you think you were trying to protect can recover from the emotional abuse of your hatred and join the rest of us in the 21st century.
Race is an illusion. Gender is a more persistent illusion. People are people. And we have a long way to go.