Comments on: Oh, the Humanity

By: Keith Ellis

Keith Ellis — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 09:24:36 +0000

epist: as dsquared said, the error is probably in your 3rd premise. Specifically, probably, the cultural conservative view is that by nature, all people are heterosexual but that heterosexual people can choose to engage in homosexual activity or even a general homosexual orientation, but to do so is in some sense “wrong”. One can disagree with one of more of their assumptions, but I don’t think the reasoning is invalid. I’ll take this opportunity to repeat my warning that although a naturist position on homosexuality is attractively useful for political purposes in the short term to those of us advocating gay rights, in the long term it may be very counter-productive. Anyway, this position may be factually wrong; and in any case it is mostly irrelevant. Would any of us be willing to legalize/protect homosexual behavior for homosexuals only but criminalize homosexual behavior by heterosexuals? I sure wouldn’t. I prefer to answer the cultural conservatives’ moral argument directly: there’s absolutely nothing wrong with homosexuality.

By: Keith Ellis

Keith Ellis — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 09:11:59 +0000

I’m saying that many of the people now yelling about decency and exploitation and poor Mary Cheney were the same people who didn’t hesitate to kick Chelsea Clinton around when the opportunity presented itself. Did you actually verify this? And if you did, do you think you did enough to explicitly limit your complaint to those that are guilty of this? Or are you attempting to tar every right-winger that is complaining about the Mary Cheney mention with this hypocrisy brush? I won’t deny that I, too, sometimes indulge in coupling hypocrisy accusations with generalizations. It’s so damn easy to just generalize “those people” (in this case and my case, the right-wingers) as all holding to some view and some behavior, and then claiming hypocrisy for the group as a whole when some particular members of that group are hypocritical. The end result is that mentally I’ve just reinforced my caricaturing of a disfavored viewpoint or group.

By: spencer

spencer — Sun, 17 Oct 2004 17:53:32 +0000

It is one thing to say something about a child, and even when she was in college Chelsea was a child. But Mary isa 35 year old woman that works full time for BCO4. So bring her up and Chelsea are really two different things.

By: markf

markf — Sun, 17 Oct 2004 04:03:28 +0000

“Kerry was using Cheney’s daughter to harm her father….” It seems that if I publicly criticized Mr. X for beating his daughter that I would be in violation of this principle. “More thoughts here: ‘thou shall NOT speak of another’s kid in any way that could POSSIBLY be construed as negative’ Upon hearing that Mrs. Y had said that daughter above “…had probably deserved it…”, would this indeed be further proof of my error?

By: KCinDC

KCinDC — Sun, 17 Oct 2004 00:19:18 +0000

For a significant portion of the voting public, being a Democrat is being wrong. That doesn’t mean saying someone is a Democrat is an attack, especially if the fact was already discussed in a previous debate.

By: bryan

bryan — Sat, 16 Oct 2004 23:57:46 +0000

a smear is untrue. this is true. it is however an attack. in this case it is an attack because for a significant portion of the voting public that tends to vote republican being gay is being wrong. thus kerry can manage to divide some of his opponents votes from him. in return the opponent tries to attack kerry by arguing that kerry’s attack means that kerry is not the caring liberal that he has been portrayed as, this is, to say the least, a problematic line of attack on kerry. “Regarding the second part, yes we all know Cheney’s daughter is gay. We knew it before. That’s not the issue. The issue is why bring it up?” I personally have a reason why this attack should be brought and more forcefully than it has been, mary cheney’s lesbianism is the lifestyle choice of privilege, her father’s party attempts to derive political benefit from hating gays, it produces legislation that is inimicable to gay people, while mary cheney is gainfully employed as professional gay republican icon for moderates to feel that supporting a hateful agenda is okay. disecting the discrepancy would be very beneficial to the body politic.

By: KCinDC

KCinDC — Sat, 16 Oct 2004 23:15:15 +0000

The choice–genetics dichotomy is indeed a false one, but surely so is the heterosexual–homosexual one.

By: Ken C

Ken C — Sat, 16 Oct 2004 20:24:46 +0000

A particularly remarkable rightwing explanation for the Mary Mention was that Kerry was shoring up his support in the homophobic black and hispanic communities by mentioning a lesbian Republican. Another putatively homophobic constituency that Kerry was supposedly appealing to was “blue-haired old ladies”. There’s an element of desperation there, I think, desperation to make a mountain of cynical manipulation out of a molehill. Along the lines of Juan Cole’s discussion, I think the Cheneys and other rightwingers are pretending to be angry so that they can appeal to people for whom the Mary Mention was akin to Kerry mentioning a somewhat embarrassing, unmentionable problem of Mary’s. (Plus, of course, this keeps the discussion off of Bush’s failings.) So for example, suppose Mary Cheney had genital herpes. One could imagine this to be public knowledge, and even that Mary might be a public spokesman for sufferers of genital herpes. Still, it would not be something for Kerry to bring up, even supposing the question had been about the etiology of genital herpes. The wingers are appealing to people for whom lesbianism is akin to genital herpes.

By: Jon H

Jon H — Sat, 16 Oct 2004 19:16:07 +0000

clark goble writes: “Regarding the second part, yes we all know Cheney’s daughter is gay. We knew it before. That’s not the issue. The issue is why bring it up?” The question in the debate was whether being gay is a choice. Well, one could hardly think of someone less likely to have chosen to be gay than Mary Cheney, who was raised in such a conservative environment.

By: Giles

Giles — Sat, 16 Oct 2004 19:02:52 +0000

This isnt the first time that the Kerry’s have seen fit to interfer with other people’s family’s – remember Teresa Kerry and Edwards son at the Democratic convention? And this presumptiousness underlies a deeper issue – namely who ultimately controls the family, the parents or the state? The Kerry attitude suggests they lean towards that latter while the Republicans lean towards the former.

By: Ted Barlow

Ted Barlow — Sat, 16 Oct 2004 15:47:27 +0000

From Digby:

The morning news on Fox just spent half an hour talking about it and came to the conclusion that this was a bigger issue than taxes and the war in Iraq. Then one of the hideous dough boys wondered if the question had been on obesity, if it would have been appropriate for President Bush to bring up Elizabeth Edwards's "problems." I sure wish that all those moms and kids had heard that one.

By: pedro

pedro — Sat, 16 Oct 2004 15:02:22 +0000

he 'choice/destiny' dichotomy is a wee bit simplistic, imho. An interesting perspective is offerend by Anne Fausto-Sterling's Sexing the body. Sorry for posting twice. The first time, something happened to the first link, and it disappeared.

By: pedro

pedro — Sat, 16 Oct 2004 14:59:16 +0000

The 'choice/destiny' dichotomy is a wee bit simplistic, imho. An interesting perspective is offerend by Anne Fausto-Sterling's Sexing the body.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Sat, 16 Oct 2004 13:15:42 +0000

Epist: your faulty premise is 3).

By: Clark Goble

Clark Goble — Sat, 16 Oct 2004 08:49:17 +0000

The attempt to divide homosexuality into the choice/innate seems inherently a false dichotomy. It almost certainly isn’t a conscious choice for many, many people, but it simultaneously seems in error to say it isn’t a choice for anyone. Regarding whether it is or isn’t a smear. That, to me, isn’t the issue. The issue is bringing in a politician’s children to a political issue. i.e. making a political issue of their children. Whether it is or isn’t a smear I’ll leave for others to debate. Personally I think that a bit irrelevant. I do think it was done calculatingly and for political purposes by the Kerry campaign. However don’t take this as partisan. I’ve gotten equally riled up at many of the things the Bush campaign has done and don’t get me started on the 527’s of both parties. In my opinion political speech has come to a new low this year and the media has been reduced to battling soundbites rather than in depth and fair analysis. (Jon Stewart’s appearance on Crossfire the other day involved some well deserved criticism for the media)