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A Caveat.
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level_head has a post worth contemplating, regardless of its slant, called Unpatriotic.It's noteworthy to my mind because it points to a way in which we, as Americans, have gotten sloppy in our thinking, especially over the past eight years, but going back farther than that even. We have become accustomed to an us and them style of thought. The right and the left alike have spent the Bush years assimilating the "if you're not with us, your against us" mentality. And here is my warning: any lefty who brings this framework to the Obama presidency is going to be disappointed.
What we have in Obama is someone who grasps realpolitik. And that tends to mean compromise. If the last 8 years have had any effect on our culture at all, it has been to make "compromise" on either side of the fence a dirty word. The partisanship that has been brewing since Nixon, that saw its full flowering in the "Republican Revolution" and the Bush administration have torn this nation limb from limb. Getting us to where we are now demanded that Franken take on Limbaugh, that Maddow deconstruct Coulter, but the battle is now lost and won, and its time for reconstruction.
I think that Obama's ability to blend that which I agree with along with that which I find distasteful speaks volumes about his ability to reintegrate a nation that has been separated as if by a centrifuge. To those who are seeking ideological purity, he will seem a sellout, but to those who want a nation at peace, he may just the ticket.
You can't always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need.
[Edit:
bluerain notes: "I actually think it's grossly unfair to cast anyone who is angry at the selection of Warren as displaying an "if you're not with us, you're against us" mentality." This assessment is correct and just, and I have therefore removed the reference from the body of the post. Thanks to her and orv for helping refine my thoughts on that.]
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I'm telling you what you can expect from this president. For reasons that are at once different from and similar to yours I'm not a fan of Rick Warren myself. This is a man who believes that I am going to hell because I am not willing to worship his god-man. Today words from my liturgy passed through his unholy lips, and you can bet it felt like some blend of appropriation and condescension.
What he's got against you, he says out loud. What he's got against me, he says where he thinks I won't hear. I don't know which is better or worse, but regardless of what you may think of him, I'll wager that at least you don't imagine he's trying to game you.
But there was something that bugged me about what you said on the matter, so I will make this plain: you do not have the market cornered on having people trying to kill you because of who you are. You may be correct that it is still more acceptable to say "faggot" than "kike" in polite company, but these sentiments only ever go underground in any case. They never disappear. Take it from me - my city is home to Panzerfaust Records, and my synagogue has had Neo-Nazi leaflets placed on the windshields of the cars in its parking lot.
The problem is, some things come in packages. If I want to work on Gay Rights issues, chances are I'm doing it alongside people who would regard it as just punishment for the occupation if 6 million of my co-religionists got nuked. And if I want to work on Israel advocacy, I'm often stuck with people who would demand that each of us make impossible changes to who we are. It's distasteful and unpleasant in both directions. But guess what? These are both issues I work on, and I'll take my partners where I can get them.
And I won't take my eyes off of them either. Because I never know when they'll turn on me.
It's not about a difference of opinion. It's about keeping your enemies near.
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Not the point.
The point is, if an anti-semite had been selected to give the invocation and you were angry about it, I would be angry about it along with you. I would not lecture you pompously about how you needed to make nice with anti-semites if they happened to agree with you on some unrelated matter.
You know not of what you speak, in this case. Seriously.
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I was talking with my brother about this the other night, and how I'm really disappointed with the selection of "America's Pastor."
The man is a hate-monger. I can understand reaching out to those that disagree with you on a level of how to fix the economy, etc... but you do not reach out to people that actively encourage others to treat fellow Americans as lesser beings simply over the fact that they were born different. It's wrong, and it has no place in our politics. As Americans, these people have the right to believe what they want - no matter how ignorant and misguided and hateful. They do not, however, have the right to be given recognition by the government.
But that's Democrats for you. When they win, they seem to get guilty and bend over backwards to appease everyone they just defeated.
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They really aren't comparable situations at all. To be blunt, if the gay rights lobby had a tenth the clout in the U.S. government that the pro-Israel lobby does, we'd have had gay marriage years ago.
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I would argue that the two are effectively the same in our politics. You certainly can't criticize anything about Israel without being accused of anti-semitism.
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Why am I, as a Zionist I stuck with "allies" like Warren, Mac Hammond, and Michelle Bachmann - people that I detest on every matter of public policy and frankly don't trust on Israel because of their eschatological vision?
But the fact is, pro-Israel is the mainstream position to the point where to criticize anything Israel does is to risk being labeled a bigot.
This point strikes to why I made the analogy in the first place. Because this means its all about appearance. Pro-Israel is indeed more fashionable than Anti-Israel; but even this is less true than it was 10 years ago. So yeah, I regard it as transient. I don't really trust the safety I'm supposed to have.
They really aren't comparable situations at all. To be blunt, if the gay rights lobby had a tenth the clout in the U.S. government that the pro-Israel lobby does, we'd have had gay marriage years ago.
This is true. Its also true that the Pro-Israel lobby is much older than the gay rights lobby. Which is to say that I think, especially with the work of Joe Solomonese and the HRC the gay rights movement that gay marriage will happen. The clout that AIPAC has was built over many decades.
This is a phased thing. 40 years ago there were places where Jews could not buy property, clubs they could not join, and so on. Barriers were broken down carefully. Taking a hard line rarely worked. During WWII Roosevelt tightened quotas on Jews allowed to immigrate, and ships were turned away; anti-semitism of the lethal sort happened on American streets, at the instigation of Henry Ford's publication of the "International Jew" and its distribution to Polish American Clubs and other "ethnic" organizations.
The reason the analogy doesn't work today is that Jews have traveled much of the distance that gays have yet to travel.
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But they didn't get there by supporting anti-Semites just because they had other issues in common with them. Which is the issue we disagree on when it comes to gay rights, apparently.
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I think that statement is highly insulting, and also very probably hypocritical, since I *very* much doubt Richard would feel the same way if it were, instead, an open anti-semite giving the invocation.
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Bigotry should be a "you're either with us or against us" issue. I find posts like this one that apologize for it in the name of political expediency pretty disturbing.