Miss California is Wrong

Between the potential revoking of the crown of Miss USA California and the ever-more important decision on the behalf of five U.S. states to legalize equal marriage, including, recently, Vermont and Maine, there has been a great deal of chatter on the internet, on the airwaves, and in the streets about the debate over same-sex marriage in the United States, for obvious and important reasons. I don;t think it comes as much surprise to most of you that I wholeheartedly support same-sex marriages. Scratch that. I support marriage equality. There is no reason my marriage should be referred to any differently than yours. But with Miss California USA's recent comments on "opposite marriage" and her defense of free speech (something I also tirelessly support), there seems to be a need for comment. And I am breaking my blog silence to do so.

With regards to Miss California USA, Carrie Prejean's, statement during the competition about her personal support for "opposite marriage" as opposed to full marriage equality for all United States citizens, I object, and I object to her holding the crown, worthless as it may be. As a number of my close friends and advisers have pointed out, if Ms. Prejean had said she believes interracial marriage to be wrong, there is not a chance in hell that she would hold the title she holds today. What we, as a society, need to start acknowledging, is that what she said is equally as wrong. Opposing marriage equality (same-sex marriage/gay marriage) is wrong. It is WRONG, it is immoral, it is un-American and it is intolerable. I am sick and tired of being told that I need to tolerate the opinions of bigots who believe that I am less of an American citizen than they are. I am done. If you believe that marriage (a legal right; I am not referring at all to the Christian sacrament of Matrimony, which is different) should be exclusively between a man and a woman, then, I am sorry, but you are narrow-minded and wrong, and I am not required to indulge your ignorance. What the Miss California USA highlighted is that while same-sex marriage is, inextricably, a complicated and hotly debated issue in the U.S., it is not an issue where both opinions hold equal weight. One side favors the Constitution of the United States, which millions of men and women have, and others, including myself, will willingly, die for, and another favors archaic bigotry. I do not have to accept her point of view. Her point of view is flat out wrong. I put blame on the committee for allowing Ms. Prejean to keep her crown. What she said is not simply a matter of opinion; it is bigoted, anti-American, and wrong.

What gives me hope is for as fast as she says these ignorant comments, more and more states acknowledge my Constitutional right to equality, so her opinion really does not matter. But, seriously, we should not be rewarding it.

Republicans and Race

I continue to be amazed not only at how much the Republican Party doesn’t seem to understand why they have such difficulty winning the support of minorities, but how condescending they can be in doing so. It seems to have taken the election of the first African American president to alert the GOP to the fact that they cannot continue to so earnestly alienate minorities. But their ongoing attempts to win the support of more than just white men are terribly pathetic. They’re also futile, naïve, and fairly insulting.

The country elects a Democrat who is a black man its President, the Republicans elect a black man party chairman. The nation watches as an African American President addresses Congress, the Republicans follow that with a governor who is Indian American. Rap, hip hop and R&B artists help make both the President and his call to national service popular among American youth, the Republicans begin awkwardly using phrases like “off the hook” and “you be da man.”

They just don’t get it. Jon Stewart put it well on “The Daily Show” last month:

“You know, Republicans, I appreciate what you’re trying to do here. He’s your
voice of change, your Barack Obama. But, you know, it’s not as simple as that. I
know you want to take his fight to the Democrats. But Michael Steele, he’s like,
remember when your kid really wanted a Tickle Me Elmo for Christmas? But all the
stores were sold out, so you went to Chinatown and got him a Giggle-Time All-Mo.
Michael Steele is the Republican Party’s Giggle-Time All-Mo”

Has it occurred to the Republican Party that maybe part of the reason that African Americans vote so overwhelmingly for Democrats in every election is about more than racial symbolism? Maybe the consistent support of the Democratic Party for civil rights – not just for African Americans, but for all Americans – has something to do with it. Maybe the Democratic emphasis on supporting America’s cities, inner city education and housing has something to do with it.

One of the reasons people – and parties – lose elections, is they treat the electorate as though they are stupid. Reminding the country that, while the Democratic Party has 42 African Americans in Congress, scores of African American mayors, two African American governors, not to mention an African American president, that they (the GOP) just elected an African American RNC chair, is not about to convince black voters that suddenly the Republican Party shares the values of so many African Americans. Voters think, voters choose, and believe it or not, sometimes they even do so on the basis of policy.

Plus, when Michelle Bachmann tells RNC Chair Michael Steele, “you be da man” she not only sounds like an idiot, but she highlights the ignorance the GOP has about race, because everyone – black, white, whatever – can see through that. And it’s pretty demeaning.

I've been in that wilderness before

After the midterm elections in 2002, and again after the 2004 election, Democrats were doing a lot of soul searching. In fact, for a couple years it felt like that’s all we were doing. We had “lost” the White House in 2000, gotten our asses handed to us across the country in 2002, and failed to win back the White House against a president with an approval rating below 50 percent. Massachusetts, Maryland and Connecticut – notoriously blue states – elected Republican governors.

In November 2004, the AP wrote, “Soundly rejected in their attempt to win back control of Congress, Democrats face months of soul searching as they watch Republicans flex their increased power in the House and Senate and celebrate the defeat of one of the Democrats' most visible national leaders.” The Democratic Party seemingly had no message. And once again, as the adage goes, we formed a circular firing squad, trashing our own and refusing unity.

I can recall being at the Democratic Leadership Council’s National Conversation in Philadelphia in 2003, sitting in breakout sessions that were more like group therapy, with everyone leaving more frustrated than when the session started. We had brainstorming luncheons designed to define our core principles (a group shouldn’t be meeting to decide what it’s going to stand for). Mark Penn presented a PowerPoint explaining that the Democratic Party was on its deathbed, but of course presented no ideas on how to correct it.

We were completely lost. Who were our leaders? Who should we be listening to? Was it Michael Moore? Al Franken? Howard Dean?

After he won re-election in 2004, but watched as his party’s leader was defeated, Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) said, “We have lost the ability to connect with people's value systems and we're going to have to work to get that back."

That sounds an awful lot like RNC Chairman Michael Steele. But imagine if, after 2004, we actually had let Michael Moore become the guiding force of the Democratic Party, do you think we’d have the White House, huge majorities in both houses of Congress, and control of a majority of state houses? I doubt it. While I feel for anyone who would ever have to be trapped in an elevator with those two, the difference between Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh is that Moore actually had some ideas. Limbaugh just has hatred. The Republican Party can’t shout and scare their way out of this problem. But in following Rush Limbaugh, that’s exactly what they’re doing.

My point is, I know exactly where the Republicans are right now. I’ve been in that wilderness, and the path out admittedly isn’t very clear. We likely only found it because of two people: George W. Bush and Barack Obama. That, and we got very, very lucky – which, unfortunately, was mostly at the expense of others: the residents of New Orleans, soldiers in Iraq, the middle class, and at least a few Congressional pages. And if the economy does not improve by 2012, the GOP may find the same fate, but that’d be a short-term fix for their party, and if we’ve learned anything from the past decade, I would hope it is, in part, that short-term fixes have long-term consequences.

But, alas, the Republican Party doesn’t learn. They just continue to shout.

Partisanship, circa 1933

I wrote a post the other day about the lack of partisan aggressiveness on the part of Congressional Democrats. So I decided to take a look back at the period in history to which 2009 is so often compared. During the 72nd Congress of the United States, which met from 1931-1933, the first elected since the 1929 stock market crash and the last before the election of FDR, Congress was as evenly divided along partisan lines as possible. The Senate had 48 Republicans, 47 Democrats and 1 Farmer-Laborer, placing control with the Republicans by 1 vote. In the House, the breakdown was an even 217-217 for Democrats and Republicans and 1 Farmer-Laborer, with the Democrats narrowly in control as a result of some strange deaths and special elections. Does this sound familiar, the country and the Congress being so evenly divided?

Jump forward to 1933. Franklin D. Roosevelt has been elected president, marking a sweeping change from the Hoover administration and 8 years of Republicans in the White House. The 73rd Congress is widely considered to be one of the most productive in our nation's history, rapidly enacting broad-reaching New Deal legislation. With the new Democratic president in office, was the Congress still evenly divided? Far from it. Democrats held 59 seats in the Senate (sound familiar?) and a whopping 317 seats in the House of Representatives. With the exception of a few Congresses, the Democrats would have a tight grip on Congress for nearly the remainder of the 20th Century. When the New Deal was launched, the Democrats aggressively pushed for what they and Roosevelt wanted - and got it, without question. That was good for the country and good for the party. One difference between the 73rd and the 111th Congresses that must be noted was the level of support that the Republican minority gave to the New Deal programs. Senate Minority Leader Charles McNary was criticized from some Republican leaders for never scolding GOP senators who voted for New Deal legislation. That is a far cry from today's Republican party.

My point, once again, is that the Democrats are overwhelming in charge, and it's time to start showing it, to start exercising that legislative muscle. If we truly believe that our progressive ideas will be good for the country, there is no reason we should not push forward with them and enact them into law, with or without Republican support. The country doesn't give a damn about the partisan bickering of the recent past, they are looking for action. The Democrats can do themselves some good by doing what they want, because right now, that happens to also be what is right. It's a win-win.

Elections Have Consequences

I need to vent for a moment. This has been lingering since the transition began. I am a Democrat. I am proud to be a Democrat and proud to represent the 130,000 Democrats in York County, Pennsylvania. I am also both particularly pleased and proud that my party won a commanding victory in the 2008 elections. A solid mandate for a very popular president, sizable gains in the House, and a nearly filibuster-proof majority in the U.S. Senate.

So why is it that, of late, having a "D" next to one's name seems to be a negative? I'm not saying that it's become a scarlet letter; it's not like having an "R" next to your name in the past two election cycles, but our leadership seems to be forgetting that while bipartisanship is a nice thing to talk about during the State of the Union, Americans actually like partisanship; they just dislike the partisan bickering.

There is no reason that John Boehner or Eric Cantor should be having as large a role and presence in the recent debates as they have. Why should what Boehner thinks even matter? They lead the party that Americans threw out four months ago, under the impression that by electing Democrats to run the country, oh I don't know, maybe the country would be run by the Democrats.

Asserting too much power and completely shutting the other side out, to be sure, is dangerous. But we don't have to pretend like this is a 50-50 country at the moment. We, the Democrats, won. We are in charge. We are supposed to be getting what we want. And that's not partisanship for the sake of being partisan, that's doing what the voters asked for when they went to the polls on November 4th.

The GOP is responsible for the terrible mess that we're in; the American people won't mind if the opinion of GOP leaders matters substantially less. After all, elections have consequences.

Castro has a blog?

On Sunday, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro wrote a column in the national newspaper, part of a recurring segment called "Reflections of Fidel" in which he goes on a deranged stream-of-consciousness rant about the name "Rahm Emanuel." Yes, as in the White House Chief of Staff. And it's not a political attack on the second most powerful man in Washington, it's just a crazy analysis of Rahm's name.

Reflections of Fidel: Rahm Emanuel

Where does it come from? I wondered. Over and over, the name came to mind of the brilliant German thinker, Immanuel Kant, who together with Aristotle and Plato, formed a trio of philosophers that have most influenced human thinking. Doubtless he was not very far, as I discovered later, from the philosophy of the man closest to the current president of the United States, Barack Obama.

An hour well spent

In my post from last night, I commented on how President Obama's press conference last night was long. Really long. And shortly after I posted it, I got thinking about how it's both appropriate and important that it lasted as long as it did. The country is in a very serious crisis and the American people need to be engaged and aware in a way unlike anything most of us are accustomed to. We can take an hour out of our lives to sit and carefully listen to the president of the United States explain the situation and answer questions about it.

It's in many ways symbolic of what got us into this mess. For example, last night at 8 pm eastern, millions of Americans were missing out on favorite television shows, such as The Bachelor, because the President was speaking. During the '90s and much of the current decade, our self-involvement and our mutual carelessness said it was more important to spend an hour watching reality television than taking the time to get a grip on our reality by way of a national leader.

And why shouldn't it have been? During the Clinton administration, Americans were doing very well economically, the government was balancing its budget and American troops were out of harms way...what could the president have to say that is so important? And then during the Bush administration, when things were suddenly serious again, with wars raging and corruption rampant, we had a president who hated the idea of a press conference almost as much as the American people hate Bernie Madoff. We got nothing important out of his press conferences or speeches, so why listen? Well, those days are over, and it's time to start listening - really listening - to what our leaders have to say.

The American people may not always like or agree with what President Obama has to say, but you have got to give the man one thing - no answer last night was intentionally misleading. The Bush years (and yes, also the Clinton years) were a game of avoiding giving a straight answer to a reporter's question. President Obama last night actually answered the questions. And answered, and answered, and answered. But we needed answers, and we needed really long ones, because this crisis will be longer if we insist on the evasive, short answers.