Readings From An Angry Left

may you smug little fucks be swept before the sleeping giant you have awakened:

from the american street:

1. Gay Rights. The folks who now speak for the Republican party demand that gays be shoved back into the legal and social closet; at the loony fringe, they want them exterminated. Jim deMint, senator from South Carolina, supports a platform barring gays from teaching school. John Thune supports a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Both these gentlemen were handily elected by constituencies that presumably approved of their positions.

Now, the contention is that out there somewhere there is a mass of silent Republicans who disapprove of this extremism and would happily accept some kind of middle-of-the-road solution.

WHAT IS THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD BETWEEN FULL CITIZENSHIP AND SECOND CLASS STATUS?

2. Abortion. The same Republicans who support second class citizneship for gay Americans also advocate the outlawing of abortion even in cases of incestuous rape or danger to the life of the mother; Senator deMint advocates the execution of doctors who provide abortions. These people favor giving full citizenship rights to a cell mass, and, incidentally, turning women from citizens into walking incubators, powerless to affect their own destiny, always and forever defined and controlled by the cell mass they could be carrying.

WHAT IS THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD BETWEEN A FREE WOMAN AND AN INDENTURED SERVANT?

3. Religion. The hugely powerful Jesus-freak wing of the Republican party wants to institutionalize fundamentalist Protestantism as a state religion. Mandatory Bible study. Teach creationism instead of science. Accept the Bible as the court of last resort, even if its answer contradicts all physical evidence. Actually, especially if it contradiccts physical evidence.

WHAT IS THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD BETWEEN A REASONING HUMAN BEING AND A FANATIC?

from pinko feminist hellcat:

You want to talk about contempt, take a look at the right wing’s rhetoric and antics for the past twelve years. We’ve got Jim DeMint, who would deny unwed mothers teaching positions (one supposes Mary Kay LeTourneau would have been hired, pre-divorce). We’ve got pundits and ideologues like Ann Coulter saying the only way you can talk to liberals is with a baseball bat, that it’s just too bad Tim McVeigh didn’t blow up the New York Times building (‘kay, Nicholas?) and that we’re a bunch of America-hating traitors.

You want to talk about contempt, how about the contempt of Alan Keyes who has repeatedly bashed gays? What about the contempt of the people who cheer on Fred Phelps as he pickets funerals and wakes of gays with charming signs that say “God Hates Fags”? Very Christian, that. You want to talk about contempt, how about the utter contempt shown by the right towards anyone who is at all different from them--don’t bother being part of the big tent if you’re gay, if you’re moderate, if you’re in disagreement about the war, if you’re pro-choice, if you wear a pro-civil liberties T-shirt to a Bush rally, or if you’re a deficit hawk.

both links were from i protest. who has this to say:

It's not time to pander to the ignorant. It's not time to adopt the "values" of the religious right. It's certainly not time to compromise the principles that make us what we are. Unlike the Right, we are inclusive. Unlike the Right, we consider the other side and try to make room for dissenting opinions. Unlike the Right, we tolerate contrary views. Unlike the Right, we value diversity. Those and values like them are the characteristics that make us better than the lying, blinkered, pig-ignorant idiots like Adam Yoshida, Alan Keyes and George W. Bush, among many, many others. We don't have to change who and what we are, we just have to change what we do. The truth is exactly what the Right doesn't like, since it contradicts their lies, so we have to trumpet it as loudly and continuously as we can. (And it's not like we haven't been doing that — and it's working! We very nearly won this election and we did win lots of local races in places like Oregon and California, among others.

The anti-abortion crowd likes to call us "baby-killers." So let's call them "murderers." That's their intent, is it not? The murder of hundreds or thousands of women by making abortion illegal and thereby forcing society back into the mold of the past. They know what the cost will be, and they don't care. Anti-abortionists are murderers by intent if not by action. Where are the pamphlets full of pictures of women who died from botched illegal abortions before Roe v Wade, to match the pictures of aborted fetuses? Where are the pictures of those women's parents and children, husbands and siblings? An aborted fetus was never a person, but a woman dead of a botched abortion was. Let's remind people of that.

So the ignorant idiots are afraid of seeing two men kissing? So let's show them even more. Put it everywhere they look. Show loving couples that just happen to be of same sex. Show pictures of the people dead of so-called "gay bashing" attacks. Show pictures of people's fathers, brothers, sons, daughters, sisters, mothers, all of whom just happen to be gay, even though their relatives never knew it. Constant exposure leads to desensitization. (I can attest to that; having grown up primarily in rural areas of the Northwest and South as the son of a bigoted Southerner, I had a lot of prejudice to overcome that had soaked through my skin. It was exposure that cured the prejudice, even more than my intellectual determination to not be controlled by my upbringing.) When you see it enough, it stops being shocking and starts being mundane.

The most important thing is to not surrender. The inmates have taken over the asylum, so we certainly won't be winning very much for a while, but we must keep fighting. The Right now thinks that they can walk all over us. They have a nasty lesson to learn and I will be delighted to help teach it to them. I suspect that they will get a bit of a shock when the "dead" Left suddenly turns in their hand and bites them.