HANDLING THE BULLIES

http://prorev.com/bullies.htm

HANDLING
THE BULLIES

Sam Smith

For many years now, the Republican right has engaged in a politics of
cultural bullying that is the direct descendent of the southern
segregationists. It is based on anathematizing a minority in order to
solidify its own political base around false assumptions of purity and
superiority. It is an illusion that deceives much of its own
constituency into thinking that ultimately minor cultural differences
are more important than such issues as economics, healthcare or public
education. Thus it is not only mean, it is masochistic. One minority
ends up being hurt by another that is being conned and hurt in other ways.

The illusion works best in a politics in which a large portion of the
public is politically inert. That way you don't have to convince a
majority, you need only mobilize your own minority. It is a vile sort of
politics that deliberately fosters hate and anger and is as alien from
the American ideal as one can find. It is, in fact, far closer to the
theocratic tyranny of the Taliban than to anything in our own best
traditions.

One of the reasons the Republican right has gotten away with it so
successfully, however, is that both the media and liberals have been
willing to fight the battle precisely on the grounds that the right
wishes: namely the presumption that one must choose sides in whatever
cultural jihad it launches.

Thus we find pundit and Democratic pol alike groaning over the likely
prospect of gay marriages becoming a major campaign issue. If matters
follow their normal course, they will and the GOP will be delighted. But
such a course has been disastrous to Democrats in the past so they
might, for a change, think of doing something different.

Like changing the ground of the argument. Instead of letting the GOP
define the issue as between morality and sin, the Democrats could
reframe it as a debate between extremist bullies on one hand and
moderate, fair minded Americans on the other.

Imagine, for example, a Democratic candidate who was asked in a debate,
"What do you think about gay marriages" and who in reply said something
like this:

"I'm a heterosexual and I'm married so I don't think about it much at
all. What does bother me is when one group in this country tries to
foist their personal values on another, and even tries to enforce it
with a constitutional amendment. That's about as un-American as you can
get. If you don't like gay marriages, then don't become a gay and don't
get married.

"I'm not asking you to approve of gay marriages anymore than I would ask
you to believe in the Virgin birth or the apocalypse. But what if
someone told you that it should be illegal to practice rites presaging
the second coming of Christ? Should we have a constitutional amendment
to ban that, too?

"What I am asking you to do is to be good, decent and fair-minded
Americans and practice the sort of reciprocal liberty in which citizens
say to each other, I will respect your liberty because I expect you to
respect mine. We do not have to agree, we do not have to approve of each
other, we do not even have to like either other, but we do have to share
this land and our community fairly. That is what being an American is about.

"In my campaign I am trying to gain support of as wide a cross-section
of America as I can. To do this, I may sometimes compromise, I sometimes
equivocate, but I will not - as conservative politicians so often do -
expel, isolate, and eliminate constituencies simply because they do not
look or think like me. I will not sneakily encourage others to hate and
bully. To do so is to take us back to shameful times, such as to that
time less than 40 years ago when you could be arrested and jailed for
being married to the wrong person - not then because of the person's sex
but because of their skin color.

"As a public official I will not debate the issue of gay marriage
because it is not the business of public officials. It is the business
of religions and of the individuals involved. If the state can write a
church's rules on marriage, it can determine how holy communion is
performed and how its bishops are selected. But it can't do that because
the constitution says it can't.

"We live in a society in which, over the past few decades, the division
over another cultural issue - abortion - has been the subject of a
bitter, costly and ultimately pointless debate with few minds changed
along the way. What if we had understood at the start that our proper
goal was not to force everyone to agree with us, but to make sure that
each side could practice its beliefs without interference by the other.
That would have been the truly American solution to the problem."

"Being American means living in close proximity with people whose
values, intrinsic nature or behavior may not just be different, but
which you may not like at all. Does that mean we just sit on our front
porches and glare at our neighbors? Or worse? It doesn't have to be that
way.

"It is not a conservative or liberal matter and it is not an issue of
morality; it is an issue of whether we will treat other Americans with
fairness and respect or as playground bullies and cultural tyrants."
--