Going both ways

[digitaldiscipline]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kergan-edwardsstout/romney-lgbt-rights_b_1980231.html

Politics is not black and white, but, on some issues, yes, there is a bright line.

Your dollars, gods, and bombs do not trump anyone's humanity. I'm sorry if you feel otherwise, but that doesn't make you any less wrong.

I am a straight, white, professional American male; just about the most privileged position it's possible to inhabit.

And if I see anyone trying to defend this bastion of opportunity from women, from people of other races, from LGBTQ folks, from people who believe in minority religions or hold no faith at all... I believe you're wrong.

Privilege isn't a zero-sum game. It's a volcano breaking the ocean's surface and peeking above the waves, the rim of the caldera, yes, probably remaining somewhat above the surrounding new land, but more and more showing above the waves.

Don't be the waves, eroding opportunity and equality from people who ought to have it.

Don't deny people equal rights, equal opportunity, equal pay. Don't protect power and privilege because "that's how it's always been."

I have seen some pointed criticism of social-issues voting as being "juvenile," because the critic believes that reproductive rights (that is, the ability of a woman to have control of and agency over her body, despite what a man may want) and gay rights are somehow all about the fucking. It's not about sex, it's about freedom, and if critics are unwilling or unable to see that, I don't think anything I say will open any new eyes or change any minds.

Maybe something someone else, just as angry and maybe more erudite, wrote, would:

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/10/25/a-fan-letter-to-certain-conservative-politicians/

If you vote for people who do those things, I believe you're wrong.

And if you feel the same way about me, you won't be missed.

Comments

[sskipstress.livejournal.com]

Something about the tone Scalzi used in that piece reminds me of a kindergarten teacher. Which is better than reminding me of my rapist. Maybe it's that or maybe it's because I think abortion should be a legal medical option no matter the circumstances of the conception, he didn't convince me that a ban on abortion with exceptions for rape and incest is somehow better than a ban on abortion with no exceptions.

I think the anti-abortion politicians are correct when they say that if abortion were only legal in cases of rape and incest, there are women would falsely claim rape or incest in order to have a legal procedure performed by a trained doctor. I know I would only hesitate if the rapist had to be identified or, worse, convicted. Because right now I do not want to be raisin' no babies and chances of me having a baby healthy enough to be adopted into a good home is pretty much nil.

[ldybastet.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link. I now have a headache from reading (half of) the comments too, and have to stop, but it was worth it. I love John Scalzi, and I love the way he flips the POV around to further emphasize the issue of women's right to decide over themselves!

[farchivist.livejournal.com]

Yes.

[warriorinside.livejournal.com]

I'm the critic who believes that there are more important issues this election cycle than that - like jobs and not drowning in debt. And yes, I'm about to kick you off my flist and my Twitter, but before I go - time to be brutally honest.

You have the freedom. You can do what you want already. It's not illegal to be gay in this country, no matter what the militants will have you believe. Expecting other people to accept and approve of it regardless of their beliefs denies them their right to believe as /they/ see fit, and is needy, attention-seeking, and immature. You have the right to do as you see fit. You do not have the right to force other people to like it. That is what the militant LGBT crowd wants as far as I can tell, and frankly, it's just as hypocritical, smug, and self-righteous as the Christian right. They're no different. Liberalism is a religion in its own right, as virulent and destructive as any other.

Frankly, I think you're a hateful and arrogant little snot. There's no attempt to understand a differing viewpoint - typical privileged liberal. Your nose is in the air with every boring-ass post you write and you look down on people who disagree with you. I know damn well you'll delete this, and me. I don't care. Go right ahead and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. When you grow up enough mentally and emotionally to understand that freedom to do as you see fit applies to people regardless of whether you like their viewpoint or not, and that you have no right to expect and demand that other people approve of your life decisions, I might bother with you.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

You know.... your dismissal of anyone who disagrees with you as "immature" was, in fact, what prompted this. I protected your identity when folks explicitly asked who I was discussing when this crossposted to facebook, but if you're going to out yourself as a close-minded bigot, knock yourself out.

I fail to see how any sentient, self-aware woman can vote Republican without a healthy dose of denial or self-loathing; if you can explain your position with some degree of rationality, I am eager to listen, because it frankly fucking baffles me, and every woman I've spoken with, feminist or not.

You can call me whatever name you want, and whatever names the folke here call you was at your invitation. Honestly, the worst thing I've considered you is "Bruins fan" until your post today.

[cassandrasimplx.livejournal.com]

I've seen better flounces on confirmation dresses, oh person whose journal is flocked to avoid "LJ drama". Sounds like you should have been "brutally honest" a long time ago instead of subjecting yourself to the ordeal of watching a straight white middle-class guy see the "differing viewpoint[s]" of LGBTQ people, people of color, people with less resources, and women... and still not agree with you.

Don't worry, those soft spots on your skull will go away when you grow up just a little more. Maybe until then, like the man says, you should wear a helmet.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

Nobody is forcing anyone to like it. I don't like organized religions, but, other than calling people who belive in them deluded, reality-impaired, and arguably insane, I am not preventing them from holding that belief. I am not voting for people who actively work against them, insofar as separation of church and state is held to be a good thing.... freedom of religion includes freedom *from* religion. False equivalency carries no water here.

I are telling people to stop being discriminatory fuckwaffles about social justice, and denying LGBTQ people the same rights with their partners that hetero couples currently enjoy in the supposedly-blind eyes of the legal system. Your vote actively contradicts and countermands that.

[cassandrasimplx.livejournal.com]

...maybe it's because I think abortion should be a legal medical option no matter the circumstances of the conception, he didn't convince me that a ban on abortion with exceptions for rape and incest is somehow better than a ban on abortion with no exceptions.

That may very well be the reason. I mean that literally, without criticism of you for it.

Scalzi was specifically targeting people who believe in a ban with no exceptions and the common claim that such a unilateral ban does not remove any right a woman has a valid claim to. His broader point is that any stance that dictates when a woman may or may not terminate a pregnancy is a stance that seeks to control an aspect of life that should be left to the individual to decide, but his specific purpose is restated clearly in the comments, in response to a critic:

“you have shut off the discussion on the main reason why a vast majority of people may disagree with your view.”

Actually, I have forced them to confront a question that they are otherwise easily able to avoid, and therefore do.

This is consistent with his statements opening the comment section that lay down extra ground rules about not allowing the discussion to stray to a broader discussion of abortion in all or other cases; he is forcing the discussion to remain within the framework of a scenario that explicitly casts the debate in terms of who has control of a woman's life when abortion is restricted, and disallowing examination of things like pregnancy resulting from consensual sex prevents certain rhetorical dodges like "she shouldn't have had sex if she didn't want to get pregnant," which reframe abortion argumentation in (slut-shaming) sexual-morality terms instead of forcing proponents of abortion bans to confront the underlying issue of governmental control of individual autonomous bodies and lives.

I agree with you that "abortion should be a legal medical option no matter the circumstances," but I thought his argument placed a neat foot in the door for that greater one: if one can see how in this case, the government is assisting a rapist in taking greater control of a woman's body and life than the woman herself is allowed to have, how is it better for the government to control those same decisions when there's no (implied: other) rapist involved? That objection, inverted, comes up defensively several times in the comments, and each time Scalzi has had to wrench the conversation back to his limited scenario because (for reasons that alternately baffle and, when I think I understand them, disgust me) this is the stance that pro-life activists least want to talk about and must stretch extrapolations from other philosophical positions to justify holding.

I'm not intending to criticize your own political opinion here at all, just offering the viewpoint from which I thought the piece worked well as rhetoric.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

I fail to see how any sentient, self-aware woman can vote Republican without a healthy dose of denial or self-loathing;

Unfortunately, self-loathing is something that's not in short supply.

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

I'm the critic who believes that there are more important issues this election cycle than that - like jobs and not drowning in debt.

Then, seriously, you need to start learning a few things about those "more important issues", because people that do know about them know that the GOP either lying through their teeth or are at best indulging in such deep fantasies that I'm surprised they can keep their hands out of their pants while talking about them. Even David Stockman, Ronald Reagan wunderkind budget guy, who pretty much lead "trickle-down economics" to the mainstream says that the GOP's economic plan and budget are "a fantasy" and won't be able to pay for itself, ever. There do not exist enough things to cut to make the thing work. Further, every single place that has implemented austerity measures to fix its economy in the way that the GOP is talking about, cutting its way to solvency, has failed to achieve the goal and ended up in even worse circumstances. Spain's unemployment is running at 25% outside of Basque areas. Basque is under 10%. Why? They've got a separate economy from Spain proper, and have spent the past half decade investing in infrastructure and educating their workforce, and now they have a booming manufacturing sector. England, which dove into austerity on its own, has austeritized itself into a second recession.

See, the way to deal with debt is to grow out of it. That's what gave the US a surplus under Bill Clinton: the economy grew fast enough that there wasn't time to tax-cut out of it. And people were well-off. And the middle class could buy things. This "grow out of it" works at ANY economic scale, from national economies down to individuals. The entire point of borrowing money for a university education is not that one is expected to pay off that loan at one's current income, by buying cheaper toilet paper and less breakfast cereal (discretionary cuts). One is expected to use that education to get a better job, a promotion, something to make one's personal economy grow, such that paying on that debt becomes feasible. And you can't pay that debt making minimum wage, no matter how little cereal you buy. There just isn't enough cereal to cut. You must have more income, which on a government scale, means you must have more taxes coming in. From someplace. The poor don't have that. The rich have only part of it, and can usually figure out ways to skate out of paying some of that. You MUST make the middle class richer so that you can take more taxes from them, not less.

Don't let people tell you that cutting taxes makes everyone better off. It's a lie.

[cheez-ball.livejournal.com]

This is all very ironic. From what I've seen etcet is moderate as far as liberals go. If the Dem party once again became the party of tin foil hats that it was in the early 90s i'm sure he'd become an independent. Right now the Rep party has that dubious honor.

The thing that seems to be lost in a lot of the rhetoric is that people seem to forget that "those people" are actual living human beings. If you're not LGBT you might think "they're" issues are fringe issues and distractions. But to someone who is LGBT and who wants to marry the person they love and has been denied that only because the person they love is the same sex/gender as themselves, it's a big issue. It affect medical insurance, health care, end of life decisions, reproductive decisions and many, many aspects of that person's life. And because this affects people I love, it also affects me. It doesn't help that many people claiming to be "good Christians" are telling their congregations that people like those who I care deeply about "deserve to die". As a Christian myself I find this beyond offensive and horribly hypocritical. Jesus had A LOT to say about religious hypocrites. He also had a lot to say about our absolute obligation to help those who are persecuted and the destitute.

The whole JOBS thing is ridiculous. Every single politician claims they have the answer to the current employment crisis. Truth be told no one person will ever be able to fix. Every politician has to work with all of the other politicians to make anything happen. We have seen a track record of a lame duck Republican Congress that has no intention of working together with anyone else or even considering compromise (or their idea of compromise is do everything I say and dump all of your prospects). Their job is to make things happen and they're not willing to do their job. in session after session after session. And while some might say things like abortion and women's rights are special interest topics, our Congress has chosen to vote on those issues or tack them onto jobs/employment bills and federal budgets instead of things that might help the jobs crisis. Why do you suppose that is? Most of us thought the question was answered with Roe v Wade in the 70s but our Congress (and state legislatures) is (are) bringing the fight to us. The Republican Party is forcing a battle on social issues, NOT a battle on how to help the unemployed.

[cheez-ball.livejournal.com]

*"their*

[sskipstress.livejournal.com]

Thank you for replying in such detail. It is definitely emotionally difficult for me to stay within Scalzi's tightly defined framework of this particular argument. I keep making the jump from "the government shouldn't be facilitating the rapist's control over the woman's body" to "the government shouldn't be controlling women's bodies".

[etcet.livejournal.com]

I hold a lot of way lefty views, a lot of right-center views, and a whole passel of stuff that's generally one standard deviation left of center (more or less, "stay out of my personal business, make sure the general welfare is protected and provided for, and if someone fucks up, smack them" - it's generally pro-responsibility with a healthy dose of "we know you're a conscience-free, profit-driven douchebag, corporation x, so you're not getting treated like a person, you're being treated like a sociopathic child"). if you were to map my opinions onto those of the candidates, i've got a fairly substantial overlap with the green and libertarian folks this time around (85%, roughly), about a 70% overlap with Obama... and something like 15% with Willard.

If I didn't live in a swing state where my vote might actually matter, I could vote my conscience freely, but I remember 2000 all too well, so I'm throwing in with the disappointment instead of the evil.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

The government shouldn't be controlling anyone's bodies.

My stance on sexual legislation boils down to "You can fuck whomever you want, as long as they're able to consent to it." Not exactly complicated stuff, but there is a lot of pushback from very noisy religious quarters and creepy reddit neckbeardy ones.

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

Nah, Roe v Wade answered pretty much nothing and created a whole lot of messy legal corners. As law, it sucks. However, it addressed a really need societal need that hadn't been able to be addressed before. That is, there's a whole lot of very needful and important reasons for abortion to exist, some of which people are willing to own, and some of which their less able to, and Roe made that possible when it generally wasn't before. Good policy, bad law.

[sskipstress.livejournal.com]

This is a bit long, but I like the way it takes on the pro-lifers on the issue of saving the babies.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2012/10/how-i-lost-faith-in-the-pro-life-movement.html

[angledge.livejournal.com]

It's not illegal to be gay in this country (anymore - thanks Johnson v. Texas!) but it's not a position of equality either.

In my home state, I can be fired simply because I'm gay - & I would have no recourse, because that's legal here. My company (thank God) chooses to offer health insurance to same-sex domestic partners, but because of the Defense of Marriage Act, they have to pay me about $120 extra a pay period, then immediately withdraw that $120 to pay for their share of her benefits. Since that is recorded as income, my taxable income is increased by about (120 x 26 =) $3,120 a year. This increased my Federal income tax bill by about $500 for 2011. Just so I can provide health insurance for my wife same-sex domestic partner. The same wife same-sex domestic partner, incidently, who can't visit me in the hospital unless she brings along a copy of our medical power of attorney document, or draw Social Security based on my income instead of hers should I die, or inherit our estate from me without paying taxes on the entire amount.

Tell me again how I can do what I want already?