What a terrible irony that the least moral person ever to have served as president of the United States, a man pathologically incapable of speaking the truth, should be returned to office because of “moral values.” What a terrible fate for the people of the Middle East. And for the people of the Midwest as well.

 

“Moral values” is nothing more than code for a series of social wedge issues, especially gay marriage, and it is doubly ironic that Bush should have received the support of nearly 79 percent of those who went to the polls claiming that “moral values” was their primary concern, more than the economy, more than terrorism, more than the spiraling deficit. Doubly ironic because it was patently clear than John Kerry wasn’t going to do anything to actively further the aspirations of gay men & women to the same equalities promised all Americans under the Constitution. Ever the cautious man, Kerry saw how badly damaged Bill Clinton’s first year in office was because precisely because he attempted, in one bold stroke, to eliminate discrimination in the military on the basis of sexual orientation. Kerry spent the campaign running away from the issue.

 

It is pathetic that, when confronted with real threats – Osama bin Laden, Halliburton, the pending collapse of Social Security, ongoing job loss, the prospect of an even more reactionary Supreme Court led by Antonin Scalia, the end of Roe v. Wade, fundamentalisms of all manner – what Americans really fear most is kari edwards. And Dennis Cooper, Judy Grahn, Adrienne Rich, Samuel R. Delaney, David Melnick & Kevin Killian. How sick is that?

 

Homophobia in an individual is a mental illness. On a social scale, it is dangerous & ridiculous. The Republican politicians who used it to turn out what Karl Rove liked to refer to as the 4,000,000 “missing evangelicals” who had failed to show up for W in 2000 know full well that homophobia as social policy is a form of hatred that has a limited lifespan. If you poll people by age groups, people currently under 30 have no interest in oppressing their peers, regardless of what their political positions might be on other issues. This generation has grown up with out-of-the-closet models of successful & well-adjust gay men & women everywhere, even in small town rural “red state” America. They don’t see Queer Eye for the Straight Guy as a threat to anyone.

 

That’s not true for older age cohorts – I know at least one major poet in his sixties who is perfectly out to his friends, but not at all publicly, even now. He lives & teaches in a red state. The GOP and the political wing of the born-again movement know full well that they can only slow down the evolution of human rights, but also that they can slow it down significantly – by a generation at least – if they can enshrine hatred in the U.S. Constitution. So I expect that we will see a serious effort to do just that. And I would not be shocked to see a Right to Life amendment follow suit.

 

Rep. Barney Frank & others – especially within the blue dog Democrat circle just to Frank’s right – will argue that it was the intemperate over-reaching of a few gay men & women, aided by the foolish pandering of pols like Gavin Newsom, the mayor in San Francisco, who inadvertently gave us four more years of W’s depredations. The public, they would argue, needs to be educated. By being two steps ahead of public acceptance, gay men & women who seek the right to marry inadvertently provoked the reaction that Bush rode to his second term.

 

I reject that argument completely. I don’t think that you can ask people to wait to be free. If we followed that logic, we would still be talking about the best ways to get rid of slavery. And whether women should have the vote. It is precisely the kind of pushing-the-envelope that we have seen in San Francisco & elsewhere that actually educates people & changes minds. But nobody said this would be easy.

 

Further, I think that this is a short term victory for the forces of darkness, at least on this front. If anything, giving hatred full voice in the Constitution can only widen the gap between the GOP and younger voters. Even worse than appearing a bully is appearing a fool – the current leadership of the Republican party is both. If we can just keep this new generation of voters, who turned out for Kerry by nearly 60 percent, from drifting rightward as they age, there’s hope.

 

That’s a significant if of course. The Republican Party has over 100 years of experience – at least since Boss Hanna morphed it into its current manifestation of the party of the “Haves and the Have Mores,” circa 1900 – getting people to vote against their own self-interest.

 

Case in point. One comment in response to my note last Monday about working to get out the vote was a note from Gerard Vanderluen, someone I’ve known slightly since the days when we both read in the open readings at Shakespeare & Co. Books in Berkeley, circa 1965. Vanderluen went on to become a successful writer & editor, and ultimately the IT director, for Penthouse. Somewhere along the way, he became some kind of superpatriot also, or so I gather from his blog. His vote, he notes, cancelled out mine (tho my get-out-the-vote work multiplied my one vote several times over, Gerard, and I will note that my swing state voted my way on the presidency – how did your state do?). My thought today is this: doesn’t Vanderluen realize that his sort is right on the bullseye on the hit list of the GOP “values” coalition? Out of just such muddled thinking was the Bush coalition cobbled.

 

The next few years will prove to be exceptionally important – and exceptionally stressful, I would wager – for all of us. The future direction of the Republican Party is no more clear than that of the Democrats. The punditocracy is already tossing out names for the ’08 race (Bush will be a lame duck faster than any of his predecessors I suspect, tho that may have more to do with the nature of media than with his own limitations): Clinton vs. McCain, Dean vs. Giuliani, Bill Frist vs. Bill Richardson, Edwards vs. Rice. The reality is that the coalitions that will determine the next presidential contest are already starting to form, although nobody – literal number – nobody understands even remotely right now what they will look like.

 

The Democratic center, especially the Democratic Leadership Coalition has now had its man in place for two elections in a row & so far had nothing to show for it.* Are the Democrats crazy enough to try that a third time? If the blue dogs can pin this election loss on gay rights activists, they will. The reality is that the Dems had only one person in the race who actually articulated any reason to vote above & beyond not being Bush – that was Howard Dean. Tho I’m sure that Dean is planning to run – I may even support him – it is very rare in history that anyone has the opportunity to make two serious attempts at that office. Look at Sam Nunn, who could have had the ’92 nomination just for asking. He decided to wait until he had a “clear shot” in 1996 instead, only to have Clinton come in & beat Bush I. One result: this was the first year since 1992 that the Democrats have had an open race at all for the nomination. And 2008, presuming that Cheney’s heart holds up the full four years**, will be the first time since 1952 where that may be true of both parties. Eisenhower vs. Stevenson, the two ’52 non-incumbents, set the table for the whole of the Cold War. We wouldn’t have had the Vietnam War without that race & those contestants***, maybe not even the sixties, at least not in the way we imagine them now, certainly not the Nixon administration, not Watergate & thus not Ford, Carter or Reagan.

 

For the time being, however, we have real – and for the most part defensive – battles to make: to try & save Roe v. Wade, to get our troops out of Iraq, to keep Social Security alive & preserve what little accessibility to affordable health care still remains. It’s time to get busy.

 

 

 

* It likes to claim Clinton as well, but he won not because of the DLC or his centrism, but because Ross Perot crippled the GOP in two straight elections.

 

** If that pump gives out, expect W to give somebody a leg up on the nomination via appointment. For this reason alone, I wish Mr. Cheney the best of health.

 

*** They both ran again in ’56, but by then Ike was the incumbent.