Deluding Who About What

Self-Deluding Right Think Anti-Gay Will Help Bachmann Win

Marcus and Michele Bachmann are, of course, correct about something. Being lesbian or gay is a bleak and dreary existence…what they forget to mention is that this is only true if you happen to live your life in the closet. Those of us who live our lives openly and out of the closet find our lives to be far better and happier than they were while we were hiding them.

There is a history of self delusion on the part of the anti-gay political and social movement. Part of that is the idea that homosexuality is a choice. To a certain degree, yes, it is a choice. A lesbian or gay can choose to be miserable and married to someone that they do not like all the while engaging in dangerous behaviors such as unprotected sexual encounters with random individuals, or they can choose to live in the open and have a real shot at a happy monogamous relationship.

The other self delusion that is going on right now is that opposition to marriage equality is, somehow, going to play well with the American audience. Yes, it will play very well with the base, and it is likely that Michele Bachmann will win the 2012 Iowa Caucuses, but let us also be clear, that advantage comes to an end in New Hampshire, and it is going to be rather abrupt.

Recently, Representative Bachmann and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum signed a 14-point pledge crafted by Bob Vander Plaats of the FAMiLY Leader. That pledge says that being gay is a choice and a public health risk. Of course, what they tend to ignore is that choosing not to be gay is the health risk because it leads people to having risky se.

Maggie Gallagher recently stated “The more that they attack Michele Bachmann on these grounds, the better her chances of winning the Iowa caucuses are. The Iowa base is extremely upset about same-sex marriage and I don’t think they’re going to look kindly on these attacks.”

Yes, the Iowan Christian-Fundamentalist-Theocratic base is upset over same-sex marriage. The rest of the population…not so much. What is more, by the time the caucus actually happens in 2012, Iowa will have had same-sex marriages for three years beginning in 2009, and it is unlikely to be the big issue that anyone other than the most hardened homophobes and bigots will really care about in Iowa. The longer nothing happens the less chance the National Organization for Marriage has for scaring people.

Human Rights Campaign communications director Michael Cole-Schwartz stated “We’re going to be looking for opportunities to get her record and her rhetoric out there.” He also said “Michele Bachmann is the very definition of a target-rich environment, and given her husband’s positions and things she’s said in past she’s going to have a really hard time appearing as a reasonable mainstream candidate.” That is, of course, if the HRC does anything useful like actually run an effective campaign since they have tended to not be on the ball while fighting NOM in the past, such as in Maine.

Years of Liberal Dogma Have Spawned a Generation of Amoral ...

A few weeks after the U.S. city of Detroit was ravaged by 1967 race riots in which 43 people died, I was shown around the wrecked areas by a black reporter named Joe Strickland.

He said: ‘Don’t you believe all that stuff people here are giving media folk about how sorry they are about what happened. When they talk to each other, they say: “It was a great fire, man!” ’

I am sure that is what many of the young rioters, black and white, who have burned and looted in England through the past few shocking nights think today.

It was fun. It made life interesting. It got people to notice them. As a girl looter told a BBC reporter, it showed ‘the rich’ and the police that ‘we can do what we like’.

If you live a normal life of absolute futility, which we can assume most of this week’s rioters do, excitement of any kind is welcome. The people who wrecked swathes of property, burned vehicles and terrorised communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame.

Most have no jobs to go to or exams they might pass. They know no family role models, for most live in homes in which the father is unemployed, or from which he has decamped.

They are illiterate and innumerate, beyond maybe some dexterity with computer games and BlackBerries.

They are essentially wild beasts. I use that phrase advisedly, because it seems appropriate to young people bereft of the discipline that might make them employable; of the conscience that distinguishes between right and wrong.

They respond only to instinctive animal impulses—to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others.

Their behaviour on the streets resembled that of the polar bear which attacked a Norwegian tourist camp last week. They were doing what came naturally and, unlike the bear, no one even shot them for it.

A former London police chief spoke a few years ago about the ‘feral children’ on his patch—another way of describing the same reality.

The depressing truth is that at the bottom of our society is a layer of young people with no skills, education, values or aspirations. They do not have what most of us would call ‘lives’: they simply exist.

Nobody has ever dared suggest to them that they need feel any allegiance to anything, least of all Britain or their community. They do not watch royal weddings or notice Test matches or take pride in being Londoners or Scousers or Brummies.

The works of Edmund Burke

The works and correspondance of the right honourable Edmund Burke

Galatians

Texas Monthly

Players of Shakespeare 2, Further Essays in Shakespearean Performance by Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company