Two days ago Congressman Barney Frank told queers across America not to bother with tomorrow’s National Equality March in D.C.. He declared the protest “a waste of time at best.” Gee, thanks Barney, I guess it’s easier to tell people to drop you an email than drag your ass out to the lawn and show your fellow gay and lesbian constituents and citizens some support.
Well, never mind. Boring! Someone brighter and with a larger audience, comedian and political commentator, Bill Mayer just took a righteous stand for homos across America, and just in time.
Yep, Obama‘s prepping a speech for the queer-fest crowd. And you know what that means. Lots of references to hoping beyond hope — and dreams within reach, dreams about a near-future when homos are no longer second-class citizens; eloquently spoken of course, with maybe an Etta James Beyonce song playing in the background.
But enough of my bitching. Here’s the best parts of Bill’s rant. You can read the entire spiel at Huff Post.
New Rule: Everyone deserves equal rights.
That’s why they’re called “equal” and “rights.” Tomorrow night President Obama will speak before a gay rights group, and on Sunday there will be a massive gay rally in Washington, or as I call it, the Million Mo March. Which makes this weekend the perfect time for Obama to announce he’s repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” and committing to a full-throated endorsement of gay marriage. One, because it’s the right thing to do and two, because it will throw the conservative base into such a frenzied, pants-shitting panic that they’ll drop all that BS about death panels and socialism and let us all get some actual work done.
But of course that’s not going to happen. I can tell you what the president is going to tell his audience tomorrow: How much he supports them. How much he agrees with them. And how he wishes he was President so he could help them out. But here’s the thing about being president. There isn’t a lot you can do without either Congress, Oprah or Goldman Sachs behind you. But there is one thing the president can do with the stroke of a pen: He can let gays serve openly in the military. It’s called an executive order. Harry Truman wrote one in 1948 for blacks in the military, and that was that.
“Don’t ask, don’t tell” has always been bad policy that was made out of a bullshit political compromise. You know, like you’re doing now with health care. It never made sense to begin with: “Here in the Army we’re all about honor. And trusting the man next to you. Now lie to my face about your sexuality, Johnson, or I’ll report you behind your back.”
When Obama speaks tomorrow, he should not only revoke “don’t ask, don’t tell,” but also change our military’s slogan to “An Army of Buns.” And starting next year, gay busing. Yes, if there aren’t any gay families in your community, we’ll bring them to you. Your field hockey team can thank us later.
And when they get out there on Sunday, Gay Nation also needs to do everything in their power to scare the hell out of right-wing homophobes. I want to see you guys rollerblading down the Mall in nothing but a speedo and a nun’s habit, holding a sparkler in one hand and a penis popsicle in the other.
© 2009, David K.. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com
I’m surprised at Barney Frank, but lets be honest about Bill Maher; it’s a lot easier to say what you want when you’re not burdened by being in office.
Again and again we attribute political pragmatism with cynicism and backstabbing; if we believe our elected officeholder secretly supports a full-fledged restructuring of the tax system and but publicly goes for a simple tax cut, he’s a weak-willed closet liberal. If our candidate claims to support full and equal rights for LGBT people but postpones concrete policies to keep his poll numbers from nosediving, he’s a backstabbing homophobe (and people actually think that “he’s black” is supporting evidence).
I, for one – a primary-voting Democrat who gets deeply involved in every stage of the process – am sure glad we got someone like Barack Obama as the nominee over Dennis Kucinich. I’m a flaming liberal, but wouldn’t vote for someone who wore that on his or her sleeve. Obama is an incrementalist and a pragmatist, saying lets achieve our goals as quickly as possible by moving them at a pace that doesn’t get us booted completely from office. Kucinich would have stopped at NOTHING to ensure that we would have full equal rights (including marriage) by the end of his first year in office. He also would have lost, and McCain-Palin would be running the country.
(Ironically, a lot of gay men I talk to hate Kucinich because he stands up for poor people and people of color as passioniately as he stands up for gays; they call him a socialist.)
I’ve never seen a clear rebuttal to pragmatisim in politics that wasn’t – lets be honest – deeply emotional. “Sure you make perfect sense,” they seem to go, “if your a secretly self-hating crazy bastard who doesn’t mind putting yourself and your people last in line. Oh, imagine what Obama would have thought if we had done that to black people during the Civil Rights movement!” (Oh wait—we did.) And of course it’s an emotional issue, but that’s the difference between pundits and political operatives. Operatives are passionate but deliberative and play the game. Operatives wait for the right moment. Operatives look at the full spectrum and ask what’s most iminently important to the people they want to help. Pundits tow their line no matter what the weather is outside. Incidentally, Operatives knock on doors, run campaigns and do A LOT more work.
I love Bill Mahr, but we have to understand that he has the privilege of a non-officeholder, and we do LGBT rights a MUCH better service by aiming for public opinion and trying to move that forward, than launching arrows at our president for being too tentative around that public opinion right now.
Bill is my favourite American, after a porn star and Christopher Hitchens. I love his movie ‘Religulous’ and he’s quite a laugh – though he does seem to play the easy crowd a bit too often.
Bill Maher tells it like it is, and Obama has left us empty-handed since his election. He’d better have been good at that speech, since he has lots to make up for now.
It is disappointing though that we can never have a real Progressive on the ballot because that notion has weirdly become synonymous with being kooky, effete, and impractical. In a better world, we could have a Nader or a Kucinich, instead of a centrist who’s a little too careful and a little to willing to capitulate. It’s easy to say that civil rights are never convenient, but historically they’ve also never been terribly popular, and that’s where a visinory steps into fill that gap.
Maher may not be in office, but he deserves a landslide of credit for doing the job of press after it decided to roll over during the first four years of the Bush Dark Age because questions became decadent and it wanted White House access. It’s really been comedians/satirsts like Stewart, Colbert, and Maher — in his case, at at definite peril to his career — who did what the Fourth Estate neglected to do when it became inconvenient.
“I want to see you guys rollerblading down the Mall in nothing but a speedo and a nun’s habit, holding a sparkler in one hand and a penis popsicle in the other”
…Duh Bill, they’re called ‘homosexicles’ =P
Eh I don’t really agree that if gay rights issues were enacted it would spell absolute doom for whichever group got them enacted. I think as long as it came in an election cycle where the average anti-gay rights wanda and wally walmart saw an improvement in their day to day economic situation it wouldn’t be a huge problem.
I also generally don’t agree that a politician’s first priority should be their reelection nor with the idea of career politicians.
To get a little irate to end (I mean it is the internet after all), I’m not sure what jacked up sense of political spectrum we are running in this country, but if fundamentalist christians with literal interpretations of scripture (which is, to be serious, psychotic) can run for office as perfectly viable candidates I don’t understand why we liberals allow conservatives to make us scared about running ANYONE left of center.
Treating the American electorate like a group of rational people making logical decisions is a big mistake- if they were would we have seen Bush reelected?
Seanshawn, as I understand it there is very solid public support for ending DADT in the USA at the moment, so why not move on that right now? From a pragmatic point of view, wouldn’t that be a good win BHO could hold up to the emotive pundits while not expending too much political capital, buying some time to work on other issues over time?