a political moment

[egypturnash]

I woke up from a strange superhero dream this morning and wanted to record it, but I put it off, so I've mostly lost it. It was very meta, stuff about what comic-book characters do when their creators aren't busy writing stories. That's all I really remember. There was something about a belly-dancing class, too.

Anyway, here's a political moment I've been meaning to have. Those not eligible to vote in the upcoming election can just skip it.

The lunatic christian fringe. One of the ongoing themes of this sort of person is beating up on faggots. Bush's White House has been against the growth of states officially legitimizing gay marriage. One sometimes suspects that they'd love to simply round up all the faggots and shoot them, or "cure" them. This is one of the elements Bush panders to. This is an element the whole Republican party has continuously embraced and sucked up to.

I am male-to-female transsexual who mostly seems to prefer women over men.

I, in short, am a faggot.

So, if you go vote for Bush, hey, you're voting for a world-view that wants to make me unexist, that would rather see me a sexless, unhappy boy. Who'd probably do a lot less art.

Keep that in mind when you go hit the polls.

Comments

[chirik.livejournal.com]

I think even if you were a MtF that liked guys, you'd still be evil and should cease to exist in their viewpoint. Unless you're anything but a normal heterosexual, you don't deserve life...

I know I'm doomed.

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

Vote For Kerry or this Peggy Will Die

[architectbesax.livejournal.com]

This argument would hold more water if you did more art.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

True. I've been in a lull. But I do seem to do more when I'm happy than when down.

[abigail-always.livejournal.com]

*freaks out and accidentally votes for leather stilettos*

[(Anonymous)]

You know, its been a big deal that Bush has approved of federal funding of faith based organizations, most people find this a clear violation of the separation of church and state, but of course his supporters think its about time the government shelled out some cash for Jesus. My point is I've never checked up on that to see if anyone knows if that money is getting to those abhorrent "Ex-gay" programs where they try to 'cure' people of being queer with the bible. You know… if it is its ominously close to actual government funded homosexuality rehabilitation programs. I’m sure they could set things like that up in some of the souther states.

-Karass

[centauress.livejournal.com]

Only indirectly. Most of the programs so far (there's 145 of them, apparently) are to feed the poor and help inmates find religion, etc.

The biggest problem with the initiative is that it does not look at results or at any non-faith based programs... And it also steadfastly ignores that much of government programs is already being contracted to faith-based organizations. (Habitat for Humanity, etc.)

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

AH! You are stealing my dreams... you haven't mentioned ducks, but I am sure you are stealing my dreams! Give them back! I don't WANT your dreams. I want mine!

:'D

[ted-boomerang.livejournal.com]

My friend's gay and she's voting for Bush. Plus according to the presidental debates, Neither Bush or Kerry are for gay marriage. They made that quite clear, actully.

[kajarainbow.livejournal.com]

The thing is, Kerry's rhetoric is notably less vehement than Bush. Both might have opposed gay marriage, but Kerry supported civic unions, Bush didn't. With Kerry, I feel like there would be much more room for future movement.

To give a little perspective, I've actually seen an article rather cautious about gay marriage but in the end offering reasons to accept it, just asking for the consideration of letting them have the time to adapt to the concept, apparently sway a fair number of people who were rather lukewarm about same-sex marriages. One person's resistance to gay marriage does not necessarily equal another person's resistance to it.

There's a whole spectrum. I feel like Bush falls a lot farther away from my desired end of the spectrum than Kerry does.

Kerry hasn't demonstrated anywhere close to the consistent pandering to some truly hateful groups that I've seen from Bush.

Bush has an abysmal record on LGBT rights...

[xydexx.livejournal.com]

Does your friend know she's voting for someone who doesn't think she should be protected from hate crimes or discrimination in employment?

Aside from gay marriage, there's a whole lot of reasons why Bush isn't our ally (http://www.livejournal.com/users/xydexx/399582.html#cutid1).

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

One candidate is from a party that embraces actual real live gay politicians, and the other is filled with people like Rick Santorum who not only don't want your friend to marry, they don't want her to adopt or have any due process because of workplace discrimination. One party signs off on institutionalized bigotry, they want to WRITE IT INTO THE CONSTITUTION, and the other doesn't.

Any political junkie knows the issue is too hot a potato to really take a stand on in a debate. It's naive to think that Kerry could put his foot down on such a polarizing subject. But look at what the party DOES, not what it says in a contested election. And it's as plain as the nose on ones' face that the Democratic party is for gay inclusion, and the Republican Party has far to much of their voting base coming from flyover states and the Bible belt for there to be any support within their party for gay marriage. The supreme court has an immense amount of influence when it comes to gay rights in this country, and a Kerry appointee to the supreme court will likely be more favoriable to gay rights than a Bush appointee.

And if anyone looks at what Bush said in the 2004 debates, and believes a WORD OF IT, they're insane, because he stood there in 2000 during the debates and said a lot of things about humble foreign policy and no nation building. and he would have to nuke a country to be any further from those words.

[paka.livejournal.com]

Add to that, the whole recession thing which Bush has repeatedly treated as a thing of the past. A wee bit difficult for any poor person to ignore.

[lapdragon.livejournal.com]

Do you actually know anybody that's worse off now than they were in 2000? Most people that say stuff like this are just regurgitating what other people are saying. Plague of madness kind of stuff.

[(Anonymous)]

Not even the log cabbin republicans can support Bush, and they've always been a little ... slow.
-Karass

[lapdragon.livejournal.com]

Peggy: You're hot, but you're totally 100% wrong here.

-most- republicans are far more tolerant than you think. True, there's probably a small number of genuine crazy assholes (Bush isn't one of them). Most republicans are relatively moderate, socially. The major differences nowadays is that Democrats seem to be pushing harder and harder toward socialism.

Having a view of saying "I don't think gay marriage would be a good thing" is a far cry from shooting people. Quite frankly, I'm a rather offended that you think that of a group I choose to make myself a part of.

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

http://www.slate.com/id/2108852

When your party stops staging events straight out of the Nuremburg Rallies, you'll have valid reason to be offended at Peggy's comments.

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

How to say this without starting a flame war...

1. Most Republicans probably are, on an individual level, fairly tolerant in their personal lives. That matters not; the party on the whole has come in recent years to consider fundamentalist Christians -- and the rich -- to be its base. I would personally be delighted to see the Republican party move towards the libertarian strain which has always existed to some extent inside it, but right now those guys are few and very much outside the mainstream of GOP thought.

2. The United States is in no "danger" of becoming a socialist state. I'd say it was at its most socialistic in the mid to late 1970s, at which time it was still *very, very* far away from anything a reasonable political scholar would call socialism. Unless you would care to label as "socialism" the corporate-welfare gifts that both Democrats and Republicans have a history of tossing to their friends and campaign donors.

3. Having a view of saying "I don't think gay marriage would be a good thing" is indeed a far cry from shooting people. However, to believe that this is the only anti-gay position the Republican party has taken is to ignore a great deal of hard evidence to the contrary -- check this page</a on the HRC's site. I'm not a Democrat, but I'd say that between Bush and Kerry, Kerry is an easy choice on LGBT issues. Incidentally, regarding your previous post: while I am not myself a techie, my circle of friends consists almost entirely of tech people. Five or six years ago those people were almost all prosperous. Now at least half of them have had a lengthy spell of unemployment, and most are working for less than they made in the 90s. Admittedly the tech industry has been the hardest hit; nonetheless, I am actually the *only* person I can think of in my circle of friends who has improved his economic circumstances in the last five years. I consider myself very, very lucky.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I know that most people who call themselves "Republicans" are more tolerant than this. However, the party leadership seems to be regularly making overtures and concessions to the fire-and-brimstone nutjob segment. I did not mean to insult anyone who considers themselves a Republican, just the trends I see from my outside view of what's actually been done.

People who actually keep track of politics have links to support this; I mostly try to avoid politics, so I don't.

[holohedron.livejournal.com]

You're very lucky to be born American. You're lucky to be born middle class (if unemployed... hey, I feel your pain).

However, you do realize that's just an accident of geography?

Suppose you were born Iraqi? Suppose the U.S. had installed a cruel dictator in your country, waged war on you when said dictator proved to be a bad investment, starved you and denied you medicine with economic sanctions, killed a cool half million of your countrymen, and returned to wage war again as a point of pride? With young inexperienced soldiers whose 'pacification' strategy is "put on some heavy metal and shoot anything that moves"?

Under those circumstances, "looking out for number one" would mean something entirely different. And it would out of necessity involve hatred and fear of Americans.

Icey, I envy your calm, I really do. It'd be nice to say that all was right with the world, that 1,000 people made a noble sacrifice. But all is not right. There's a world out there where you can't rake your neighbor's leaves to earn spending money -- because your neighbor is dead, and you're too afraid to leave the house.

Compounding matters, the U.S. is poised to instigate a world war on "terrorists and the countries that harbor them"... Iraq wasn't a particular terrorist hotspot, but my guess is that it will be from now on. It's become a rallying point for radical Islamic warhawks. Secondly, understand that terrorism is a renewable resource, and the desire to terrorize increases with every act of U.S. military aggression... we're the Empire, they're the Rebels. The rhetoric of "We will hunt down the terrorists and kill them" is both morally and intellectually bankrupt.

If you must compare Iraq to a previous war, make it WW1, not 2... after WW1, us Allied countries imposed harsh economic sanctions and generally ground the German people under our heels. Partly as a consequence, Germany became a breeding ground for fascism and Nazism. Right now, Iraq is WW1 Germany: a minor threat in danger of becoming a large one. The pacifist approach to WW2 came too little, too late. But we're not at that point yet, unless we want to be.

[kysh.livejournal.com]

-most- republicans are far more tolerant than you think.

Most republicans have no trouble letting people speak for them, then repeating loudly what they're told to say.

Meanwhile, most say whatever they think. Thus you have a chaotic mess against a united front. That the democratic party manages enough cohesion to get a candidate into the election is staggering.

Frankly, most people (And there are not many) who both think and are republican are republican because they THINK the republilcans will make them rich-- or they're already well off and think that anyone 'beneath' them is lazy and doesn't deserve to live, much less have a chance at success.

Problem is, this society forces you to be a part of it. You can't go off and eat nuts in the woods somewhere and live peacefully to the end of your days or any such nonsense. It's all private land, or 'public' land (Meaning not that everyone may use it, but that nobody may use it), and people have to pay taxes on the air they breathe, water they drink, and land they walk on. What do you propose the poor do? 'Get out and work' is
the usual answer, but there aren't any companies that would hire poor, unemployed, impoverished people without government intervention-- Which the republicans are against. That leaves the government (Which, via itself or its contracts is the largest employer of poor people in the country)... but wait.. more government jobs? That's big government! Republicans are against that.

I'm way off on a tangent here. Point is, republicans are unrealistic. Once something happens to them in their life and for whatever reason they find themselves in the red, it's quite amazing how quickly they become 'socialist' democrats. And I'm not even going into the religion thing, which is a whole different can of worms.

I'll be frank. I'm from the south. I'm a southerner. I'm quite proud of it, as a matter of fact. But I know the score, especially when it comes to republicans.

You are wrong.

-Kysh

[wolphyn.livejournal.com]

Plenty. The jobs that have been recovered pay an average of $9k/yr less than those that were lost, the tax break amounts to only an extra $2/wk for most people I know, a handful of people I know must now work several part-time jobs instead of one full-time or in the worst cases one full-time plus a part-time, the cost of living is going up which tax breaks don't fix, I know people who can't find jobs at all, etc.

[wolphyn.livejournal.com]

Dammit, this was supposed to be in response to "Do you actually know anybody that's worse off now than they were in 2000?"

[martes.livejournal.com]

I can certainly second that. I got laid off last year from a job that paid nearly $30 an hour. The industry I wroked in has nearly vanished due to outsourcing, and I can't get the same type of job now for even $10 an hour. Fuck yeah I'm worse off than I was 4 years ago. I know a bunch of people unemployed or underemployed, and virtually everyone I know, even those who have jobs, are worse off financially than they were four years ago.

re. Gays vs. religious nuts & Republicans-- I once heard an interview of writer Gore Vidal, who gave the reason for the seemingly abrupt villification of gays by religious nuts & Republicans as a by-product of the fall of Communism. With the Godless Commies no longer an imminent threat, they needed something else to focus on and rally against, and gays became the target.

[centauress.livejournal.com]

You're right, Peggy.

It's pretty clear... True, both don't support Gay Marriage. But only one supports blocking adding an amendment to the constitution blocking it. Only one supports parents. Only one supports allowing them to adopt. Only one of the two candidates supports giving them the same rights as everyone else to have housing, employment, and even medical coverage for their families. Sure, he thinks the country isn't ready for every state to choose gay marraige... But he's against making every state block it.

Which candidate will this child (http://allspinzone.blogspot.com/2004/10/who-is-this-little-girl.html) fare better under? Which candidate supports the highschooler int he second paragraph?

And really, I'm a bit annoyed at the mock offense. Sure, many people who call themselves Bush supporters are not bad, not lunatics, not gay-bashers. But look, plainly, and tell me how, if you're so offended to be aligned with the right-wing lunatic fringe... Why are you voting for their choice for president, who avidly supports all their causes?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm sure that the people who'd invalidate her parents' marriage because they both happen to be the same gender will help provide a loving, quality upbringing for her afterwards.

And yeah, that's my point on the offense some have taken: I look at what that party's doing, and what it claims to be for, and at what people who claim to be Republicans stand for, and I wonder why more of them aren't screaming bloody murder about their supposed party being taken over by the crazies.

But the binary thinking is strong.