Always a good reminder that

Doctor Cleveland — Thu, 10 May 2012 19:50:41 +0000

Always a good reminder that we should read (and re-read) Blowing Smoke.

Doc, I appreciating you

Michael Wolraich — Thu, 10 May 2012 19:08:42 +0000

In reply to Getting to No: Obama and the Republicans

Doc, I appreciating you highlighting the tendency of the right-wing to escalate its demands with each success. Gail Collins made a similar remark about the NRA today:

This appears to be yet another sign of the gun lobby’s desperate search for new red-meat issues now that it’s won everything it ever asked for. Someday there may be no more day-care centers, airports or bars left to open up to concealed weapons carriers. But we will always have the Supreme Court.

It's not coincidental. In Blowing Smoke, I tracked this phenomenon from 1977, when Anita Bryant led a campaign to repeal a Miami law that protected gays and lesbians against job and housing discrimination. Victory tends to increase the right's demands. Defeat tends to lessen them.

My theory, in a nutshell, is that the success provides affirmation. When you cling to the upside-down land of right-wing reality--where intolerant "militant homosexuals" discriminate against open-minded Christians--you require a regular dose of affirmation to assure yourself that your nutty rationalizations are true.

Success provides that. When a majority of North Carolinians pass an amendment outlawing gay marriage, they are implicitly endorsing paranoid fears that allowing gays to marry will destroy the institution of marriage (and lead to all sorts of bizarre human-animal pairings).

Conversely, failure tends to undermine the right's confidence in its worldview. The wingnuts may seem stubbornly enthralled by own fantasies, but most of them actually respond to outside opinion. The growing popular acceptance of gays and lesbians has gradually deflated the religious right's anti-gay agenda, to the point that they have resigned themselves to many changes that they once regarded as the end of the world. (Literally--preachers used to suggest that gay rights would lead to Armageddon.)

Gay marriage is really the last front in the battle for gay rights. Obama's public change-of-heart may not directly produce any legislation, and it may not directly change any homophobe's opinion, but it's one more pinprick in the right-wing's fast-fizzling anti-gay fantasies. Ten years from now, North Carolina's amendment will be under siege, if it even lasts that long.

I'm sure he's realized that,

Michael Maiello — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:28:55 +0000

In reply to Getting to No: Obama and the Republicans

I'm sure he's realized that, at this point, he could come out with a plan to cut capital gains and corporate taxes to zero, while increasing taxes on poor people who burden society and that Grover Norquist, Rush Limbaugh or some other right wing complainer would find a way to call it Marxist. We've been through this before, when they tried to destroy the Clinton presidency. But that time they used special prosecutors and witch hunts. This time they're just out to burn the village.

dagblog - Comments for "Getting to No: Obama and the Republicans"

Always a good reminder that

Doc, I appreciating you

I'm sure he's realized that,