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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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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.