Saintless

I’ve had people try to tell me that my outrage over Obama choosing Warren is divisive. That Obama is trying to bring us all together, and that I “shouldn’t be angry” over this.

Except that my anger isn’t the cause of the divisiveness, if that’s what it is. Obama’s choice is. And I damn well should be angry!

Now, I’m not saying I don’t still support Obama, because I do. I don’t expect to agree with him 100% of the time. But, this was the wrong choice on Obama’s part, and I refuse to just pretend that I think it’s ok.

If Obama wants to bring everyone to the table so we can sing Kum Ba Yah, and all get along, that’s one thing. Obama is bringing someone to his Inauguration to play a prominent role that represents hatred and equates homosexuality with child molestation. If he were to bring a prominent anti-semitic in such a way, do you really think that anyone would be telling the Jewish Community that they are wrong to be angry, or to just get over it?

Rachel Maddow drives some of my feelings home in the above video. (via ThinkProgress)

The implication of Sen. Obama’s defense is that he is returning the favor.

[…]

But Obama is not inviting Rick warren into his church or into his campaign or something. He’s inviting him to the nation’s capital to convene the swearing in of the next president of the United States. The President-elect did not invite Warren to his home. He invited him, proverbially, to our’s, the nation’s.

[...]

When human rights activists look back decades, centuries, from now, on the first presidential innauguration of an African American, a landmark achievement won’t they be thinking ‘what a great moment’, but ‘what was that guy who compared homosexuality to incest doing there?’

Apparently, even Rick Warren’s supports are upset by this. Who is being united by this?

Via Ezra Klein, I came across Matt Yglesias’ thoughts on the subject:

A brief point to make is that it’s very easy for a person who isn’t part of the minority group that’s being symbolically dissed to dismiss someone else’s concerns as merely symbolic and not that big a deal. But it’s worth considering how much public policy acts consistently to reaffirm the symbolic commitments of majority groups.

I finally got to watch Milk last night. I cried through almost the entire movie, and I don’t do that. I kept seeing so many parallels to today. No, gays aren’t rounded up in bars and hauled off to jail anymore. We’ve made progress there. But, the Prop 6 fight (to fire all gay teachers and their supporters), which Harvey Milk fought, was so similiar to the Prop 8 fight we just went through. Except Prop 6 didn’t pass, but Prop 8 did. After watching the movie, the thought “why are we still fighting this exact same fight 30 years later?” kept going through my head.

I went to see Milk with a friend, who reminded me that I should instead be concentrating on Harvey Milk’s real message. And that is – we’re all in this together. The GLBTQ community is a minority. We won’t accomplish anything on our own. We have to have the support of our straight allies. We have to form partnerships. We have to make sure that others realize that we’re here, and then that they know we are not freaks of nature.

For anyone who thinks that gay marriage or gay rights in general, are not a big deal, that there are “other, more important issues” to focus on, I have to say that this is a big deal. You don’t understand until you are the one being discriminated against. And how could you, really? Even more, though – these rights represent something far more than they might appear to, at first. Until we are accepted as equals, and society doesn’t see us as abnormal freaks of nature, we are still going to see gays lose their jobs, lose their housing, and even killed. You don’t hear about these things through the mainstream media. That means most people don’t even know it’s happening. 8 days ago, a gay man in Washington D.C. was shot and killed. All signs point to it being because he was gay. Utah is one of 20 states that do not include sexual orientation in hate crimes statistics. So, when you read that there were 1,195 victims of a sexual orientation based hate crime in 2006, that means the number is nowhere close to reality.

I could lose my job because I’m bisexual. The only way I can even hope to get a straight person to understand that, is to tell you that you, too, could be fired, if your boss just thinks you are gay. And I bet that doesn’t even halfway drive the point home.

The GLBTQ community cannot just pretend this isn’t a big deal. I’m not saying that I think we should go impeach Obama. I’m saying this community should be standing up and telling Barack Obama that we disapprove of his choice. Our voices are just a tiny part of the population, and our country is supposed to be one where the minority is protected from having the majority trample them. But, that just won’t happen if we stay quiet.

So, if you think I’m being loud and obnoxious about this, I’m doing something right.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 19th, 2008 at 1:47 pm and is filed under Barack Obama, LGBTQ. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.