Political Fire Storms
Yes, it's an election year and the mailing lists pundits, mostly myself, are off and running. Well, sitting...frantically typing our carefully crafted thoughts to put others in their subservient place in relation to our own superior ideas of life and politics. Yeah. Anyway, two topics that have gone around so far.
- Guns
- Gay Marriage
The score so far?
- On guns we are divided, heavily and probably irreconcilably. One half will probably shot the other half just to get them to shut up. I'm just not sure yet which half will do the shooting.
- On Gay Marriage, the Hate Amendment is a Bad Idea™ and the goverment should get out of the business of endorsing a religious joining of couples and just grant civil unions to ensure couples get the rights and protections that the state is responsible for. There are 1,049 of them after all. Let the churches do whatever they want...who cares?
This does demonstrate one thing though, the electorate can be very easy to distract. I know guns haven't been brought up too much, Kerry being a military guy and all, but gay marriage and the Hate Amendment have been very key in dominating the press cycles.
How many people have died in Iraq since President Bush launched his first salvo in the Culture War? What's happened to the 9/11 Commission? What about the Valerie Plaime investigation? What about the GOP hacker criminal investigation?
Ryan thinks that the Hate Amendment is a pawn on the board. I think it's designed to make sure we aren't even looking at the board. If that is offensive to advocates of gay marriage, a group which I consider myself a member of, I'm sorry. But your issue, as it's being played by the BushCo re-election team is a distraction. Of course I see it in terms of civil rights and we have to deal with it now. You can't really ignore a salvo like this from an administration this morally corrupt. But we have to acknowledge that this makes the fight that much harder, to keep our eye on the board.
If we want to be effective we have to not let them make it a distraction, but force it onto the board. We need to make it be part of the larger argument that Bush must go. We cannot drop everything and focus solely on this issue though. This one issue makes it way too close. People on the coasts, I'm looking at you. Do not forget that this issue does not play the same in outher parts of the country for dems. Nothing underscores this better than the Herseth position.
