What Did I Tell You?

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Clarissa

March 18, 2013

Republican Governor Scott Walker (WI) — a likely GOP candidate for president in 2016 — admitted on Sunday that young conservatives support marriage equality for gays and lesbians, suggesting that the Republican party cannot sustain its opposition to same-sex marriage into the future.

We will see more and more renunciations of unsustainable, outdated causes in the years to come. My child’s generation will not even understand what was the problem of the people who opposed marriage equality. “But that’s, like, totally stupid,” they will say, suspecting that we, the older folks have gone senile.

Now let’s expect the death of the opposition to reproductive rights.

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16 responses to “What Did I Tell You?”

Roberto Severino

March 18, 2013

What baffles me about these certain issues is that many decades ago, issues like abortion didn’t really divide the two parties so much , as you can read in this great article from The American Conservative. Republicans are in the same position that the Democrats were back in the late 1960s.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-gops-vietnam-212/

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  March 18, 2013
  
  Yes, it was the Republicans’ enormous mistake that they handed over the reins of their party to the religious fanatics. People have great trouble thinking ahead, that’s the problem. They just do whatever will work in the most immediate future and don;t try to think through the consequences.
  
  Now that the young people don’t attach any meaning whatsoever to the words “Vietnam War” and barely know what the Cold War was all about, things will change dramatically.
  
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David Gendron

March 18, 2013

That’s a good thing but he’s an anti-syndicalist, so…

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1. David Gendron
  
  March 18, 2013
  
  anti-union, sorry.
  
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Leah Jane

March 18, 2013

I get the feeling that people in the GOP will still have a problem with the existence of queer people, but they’ll learn to hide it in coded language, promoting policies which hurt queer people under the guise of “family values”, and other tactics they also currently employ to placate the racists in their party while denying the existence of racism in their ranks.

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  March 18, 2013
  
  Oh, I’m sure a few deluded die-hard homophobes will remain in existence forever. But they will have to hide this deformity and be ashamed of it.
  
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  1. Benoni
    
    March 18, 2013
    
    “But they will have to hide this deformity and be ashamed of it.”
    
    Nazism and Marxism-Leninism are two of the most abhorrent and antiquated ideologies out there, but their supporters don’t hide it and they’re certainly not ashamed of it. They seek out the few people as deranged as they are and create an echo-chamber around themselves, which is why places like Stormfront exist, where they can parade their shallow delusions around as much as they like. Homophobia, when it’s on the way out, would probably experience something similar.
    
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    1. bloggerclarissa
      
      March 18, 2013
      
      “Nazism and Marxism-Leninism are two of the most abhorrent and antiquated ideologies out there, but their supporters don’t hide it and they’re certainly not ashamed of it.”
      
      – Still, nobody would reveal these beliefs if trying to run for office or at a job interview. As you say, they hide in enclaves but they are not part of the mainstream existence.
      
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Steve

March 18, 2013

The opposition to reproductive rights in China seems to be pretty overwhelming.

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  March 18, 2013
  
  And they will start paying the price for that very soon. The enormous surplus of young men that can’t find a woman to mate with will cause a horrible explosion in the country. Things don’t look good.
  
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  1. cliff arroyo
    
    March 18, 2013
    
    A bunch of surplus young men with no hope of family formation is never a good thing for a society to have.
    
    Considering that India has the same problem for much the same reason I would imagine the leaders of both countries are trying to figure out how to have a war to kill off a few tens of millions of them while maintaining plausible deniability or involving the rest of the planet.
    
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    1. bloggerclarissa
      
      March 18, 2013
      
      “Considering that India has the same problem for much the same reason I would imagine the leaders of both countries are trying to figure out how to have a war to kill off a few tens of millions of them while maintaining plausible deniability or involving the rest of the planet.”
      
      – Yes, this is the direction things are going right now. And this is a great danger.
      
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  2. Rob F
    
    March 18, 2013
    
    Cross-culturally, there are a number of societies with, in practical terms (see below) a de facto shortage of men. In such societies the surplus men either leave, deal with sexual urges by homosexual methods, of (rarely) engage in polyandry (plural husbands). What has never been known to occur is warmongering solely for the purpose of killing off surplus males. On those grounds, I’m inclined to reject the idea that “[T]he leaders of both countries are trying to figure out how to have a war to kill off a few tens of millions of them while maintaining plausible deniability or involving the rest of the planet.”
    
    On the other hand, the reason the societies above have a de facto surplus of men is due to widespread polygamy, where certain well-off or high status men have more than their “fair share” of partners, leaving fewer for everyone else. Since the causes are different, conceivably it might not lead to a barring of a war for population control. (I still doubt it).
    
    The strong cross-cultural tendency also leads to a possible way to keep the peace: gay rights. (Those should still be advanced on other grounds).
    
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    1. bloggerclarissa
      
      March 18, 2013
      
      I’m all for gay rights but I don’t think it will help much in rural India or China.
      
      Another negative consequence, will be an increase in sexual violence. 😦
      
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Rob F

March 18, 2013

I’d like to wonder how much of it is young conservatives knowing someone who is gay (cf. Rob Portman, who came out for marriage equality when his son revealed that he is gay). It’s hard to be a bigot with people you know (or are forced to know, like family members).

OTOH, that simply cannot be a compete explanation. Everyone knows at least one woman, but feminism is still as necessary as ever. I don’t know what the difference between homophobia and misogyny is that allows knowing a target to end one but not the other.

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  March 18, 2013
  
  “Everyone knows at least one woman, but feminism is still as necessary as ever. ”
  
  – The women one knows can all be anti-feminist, though. The first time I met a woman who did not regale me with a string of vicious abuse when I mentioned the word “feminism” was after I moved to Canada. At the same time, a young male professor of sociology back in Ukraine rewarded me for an essay on feminism.
  
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