Appealing to homophobia

[tko_ak]

This isn't exactly news, since it happened in 2002, but I thought it was interesting.

So the Washington Post ran a piece on Jim Messina, who is President Obama's deputy chief of staff (for fans of The West Wing, think of Josh Lyman). But he cut his teeth working for Sen. Max Baucus, the Senate Finance Committee Chairman who has been instrumental

Comments

[worldmage]

It's silly to try to infer anything about the administration based on the actions of one member (even one as influential as Messina) during one campaign 7 years ago. It's as irrelevant as Obama's cocaine use in college.

What's relevant is what they're doing now. So far Obama's signed hate crimes legislation into law, which we'd been trying to pass for over a decade. That's nothing to sneeze at. The administration is far from perfect, but just by doing that he's already done more for LGBT rights than any president in US history.

I know it feels like not much is getting done, but I think we need a little more perspective. What has any other president done for us? The best Clinton did for us was entrench the status quo and appoint a few open gays, and he was the most gay-friendly president we've had before Obama.

[henkkuli]

There are people (including me) who would argue that a hate crimes law formalizes the GLBT community's "victim" status, and actually serves more as a setback in the long run. I don't see it as a cynical political ploy, just a kind of heart-in-the-right-place kind of thing.

[worldmage]

Well then, we're in the same boat as religious, ethnic, and racial minorities, persons with disabilities, and women.

Still, I fail to see how a statute that protects both the persecuted and the persecutors equally is enshrining the victim status of the former. The law doesn't explicitly protect gays. It enforces harsher penalties for crimes based on sexual orientation. That could be used to prosecute someone hurting someone else for being straight as well. It's likely it never will because that sort of thing just doesn't happen, but that's beside the point. The law protects everyone equally, so I guess it must be formalizing everyone's victim status.

I agree that it's imperfect, but it's still a step forward to have any form of legal recognition that there is, in fact, inequality between us and straights. Even if there is validity to your argument, laws aren't set in stone. If we ever stop being persecuted, the laws can be changed.

[amurderofcows]

I agree. The hate crimes law was a step backward. I'm opposed to hate crimes laws for all categories of people. It seems to me that discerning the role the victim's identity played in the motive of a crime is something very difficult for a jury to do accurately, and I think it becomes too easy for sentencing to be based on the identity of the victim and not the motive of the crime, since the former is easier to establish. And if someone beheads me, dismembers me, and sets me on fire, they shouldn't be getting out of prison regardless of motive. I also thought it was disingenuous to call it the "Matthew Shepard" act since his murderers were sentenced to life without parole, even without the law in place

[henkkuli]

Come on, Jamie, everyone knows what the real meaning of the ad is: Max Baucus never went to any hairdresser, and no Montanan should, either. ;)