I’m hardly a religious person, but I still found this worth reading. The best bit:
The dignity of our lives and our relationships as gay people is not dependent on heterosexual approval or tolerance. Our dignity exists regardless of their fear. We have something invaluable in this struggle: the knowledge that we are in the right, that our loves are as deep and as powerful and as God-given as their loves, that our relationships truly are bonds of faith and hope that are worthy, in God’s eyes and our own, of equal respect. Being gay is a blessing. The minute we let their fear and ignorance enter into our own souls, we lose. We have gained too much and come through too much to let ourselves be defined by others. We must turn hurt back into pride. Cheap, easy victories based on untruth and fear and cynicism are pyrrhic ones. In time, they will fall. So hold your heads up high. Do not give in to despair. Do not let the Republican party rob you of your hopes. This is America. Equality will win in the end.
The more I read the more I realize this election was won by the anti-gay vote. I am shaking with anger–particularly at those who have made hate a Christian “value”.
Homophobes deserve nothing but contempt. I wash my hands of them.
I’m an anti-religious person with little sympathy for hypocrites like Sullivan. If you’re going to run around promoting Catholic mysticism as a valid means of cognition, don’t complain when the bed you’re forced to lie in is the one you’ve made.
Anti-religious? You mean bigoted?
Plenty of very religious people, myself included, believe in fair rights for all. Don’t paint everyone with the same brush, okay?
No roberry..just returning the country to the rightful owners…AMERICANS!
I guess John Kerry went into the primary without a plan to win the election. The Democrats threw everything they had at this election. They ran a phony Vietnam War hero and a phony Southerner. They had middle-aged women executives at MTV hawking “Rock the Vote” to entice the most uninformed young people to vote for Kerry. They had Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews and New York Times darling Eminem. They had documentaries, books, the universities, Hollywood (and the French!) on their side.
They had liberal thugs ransacking Bush-Cheney headquarters, stealing Bush-Cheney signs and slashing the tires of Bush-Cheney get-out-the-vote vans on Election Day. In Colorado, they traded voter registrations for crack cocaine. In Ohio, they registered Mary Poppins and Dick Tracy. In South Carolina, Emily’s List called Republican households and gave them incorrect information about the location of polling places.
The media campaigned heavily for Kerry with endless Abu Ghraib coverage, phony National Guard documents and, days before the election, false news reports that hundreds of tons of munitions had been looted in Iraq.
The Democrats’ cheating never stopped. The big story of this election is the fraudulent exit polling on Election Day. Strange as it seems to me, it is well acknowledged that people are more likely to come out and vote for a winner. Early exit polls showing Kerry the clear winner could be expected to depress the vote for Bush.
Stunningly inaccurate exit polls released around noon on Election Day convinced news anchors, talking heads and even the campaigns that Kerry would win walking away. But at 9 p.m., when the first actual results began to come in, the election flipped to Bush . It was the first Kerry flip-flop that actually served the national interest.
The exit polls were absurd: They showed Kerry winning Pennsylvania by 20 points and Bush tied with Kerry in Mississippi. Only monkey business can explain the wildly pro-Kerry exit polls–admittedly hard to believe with a party that has behaved so honorably throughout this campaign. Michael Barone speculates that the sites of exit polling were leaked to the Democrats, and Democrats sent large numbers of voters to those polls to take exit polls and throw the results.
But for all their chicanery, vote-stealing, Hollywood starlets, fake polls and faux patriotism, the Democrats were wiped out on Election Day.
Bush won the largest popular vote in history with a 3.5 million margin. Indeed, simply by getting a majority of the country to vote for him–the left’s most hated politician since Richard Nixon–Bush did something “rock star” Bill Clinton never did. Bush maintained or increased his vote in every state but Vermont. Republicans picked up seats in the House and Senate, and continue to dominate state governorships. Also making history of a sort, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle lost his election, marking the first time in half a century a Senate leader has been defeated.
To Michael Moore, George Soros, Terry McAuliffe, Dan Rather, Al Franken and the whole gang at Air America Radio–you were great, guys! Thanks for the help! We couldn’t have done it without you!
Of course, we could have done it a lot earlier on election night but for “Boy Genius” Karl Rove. It’s absurd that the election was as close as it was. The nation is at war, Bush is a magnificent wartime leader, and the night before the election we didn’t know if a liberal tax-and-spend, Vietnam War-protesting senator from Massachusetts would beat him. If Rove is “the architect”–as Bush called him in his acceptance speech–then he is the architect of high TV ratings, not a Republican victory. By keeping the race so tight, Rove ensured that a race that should have been a runaway Bush victory would not be over until the wee hours of the morning.
As we now know, the most important issue to voters was not terrorism, but moral values. Marriage amendments won by lopsided majorities in all 11 states where they were on the ballot. Even in Oregon, the state targeted by gay marriage advocates as their best shot of defeating a marriage amendment, the amendment passed with 57%–a figure noticeable for being larger than the percentage of votes cast for Bush in Oregon. In the great state of Mississippi, the marriage amendment passed with 86% of the vote.
Seventy to 80% of Americans oppose gay marriage and partial-birth abortion. Far from appealing exclusively to a narrow Republican base, opposition to gay marriage is strongest among the Democratic base: blacks, Hispanics, blue-collar workers and the elderly. There were marriage amendments on the ballot in Michigan and Ohio. Bush won Ohio narrowly and lost Michigan by only 2 points. How different might that have been if Bush hadn’t run from the issue.
But Rove concluded Bush should stay mum on gay marriage and partial-birth abortion–contravening the politicians’ rule of thumb: Talk about your positions that are wildly popular with voters. “Boy Genius” Rove decided Bush shouldn’t even run radio ads on gay marriage, and, at the last minute, Bush started claiming he was in favor of civil unions, just like John Kerry.
Amazingly, it was the Democrats–the ones who support gay marriage–who used the gay issue for political advantage, most famously when Kerry gay-baited Mary Cheney during the third debate.
The one toss-up Senate seat lost by the Republicans was Pete Coors in Colorado, where the Democrats did not hesitate to run commercials of a bacchanalian gay festival in Canada sponsored by Coors Brewing Co. The most narrow Republican win in a toss-up Senate race was in Alaska, where the Republican candidate was another “progressive” on the social issues.
When contemplating a former New York mayor as their next presidential candidate, Republicans should remember: This election should have been over sometime in August, not 1 a.m. election night.
Another uninformed Republican voter.
Give some fucking citations, man!
*Yawn*
Another long, dull, innacurate, cherry-picking, naive, unrelated and apparently copy-pasted gloatfest Fletchman. All your frothy blathering and masturbatory faux epiphanies still don’t erase the fact that HALF the country still voted for Kerry (who also won the SECOND largest popular vote in history by the way).
I’ll take great satisfaction from watching your president’s house of policy cards collapse on top of him, reducing us to a laughable demi-fascist ex-superpower and leaving folks like you with no one to blame but yourselves.
um… don’t mean to be nitpicky but actually half the country did not vote for Kerry, nor did half the country vote for Bush.
60% of the electorate voted, yes? (which is great in terms of recent voter turnouts, but pathetic compared to other democracies in the world)
& of that 60%, roughly half, or 30%, voted for Kerry, which is equivalent to a little less than 20% (18%?) of the total population (or rather, the electorate, the population that can legally vote). ultimately, more people in this country still didn’t vote at all than voted for either candidate.
i’m not trying to rain on anyone’s parade. i’m just getting tired of all the “sea of red!” & “Americans support Bush!” sentiments that are running about, not only on the right but the left as well. we are not a unified country, we are not a divided country. red & blue does not even come close to covering the true multiplicity & diversity of social/moral/political realities in this country today. i mean, we’re talking 300 million people, right (give or take)? how could two parties ever hope to represent the desires, dreams, material needs & whathaveyou of so many people?
in short, all i’m really trying to say is: mandate, my shiny metal butt!
(& i would’ve said it if Kerry had won too)
that said, i would like to formally second NancyP… ;)
I have the feeling that the non-voters have a wide spectrum of views as well. Overheard on election day at work, from 30 year old white maintainance man, probably non-union – “I’m not voting, both of them are liars”. He looked like a prime candidate for God, Guns, and Gays strategy, though I could have been wrong. On canvassing in poor but not disastrous (ie, jobs, but low wage jobs) predominantly black neighborhood, talking to 2 guys fixing a car: Guy with wrench and filter: “I heard we’re supposed to get tax cuts” Me: “Those Bush tax cuts are going to Ladue residents (wealthiest suburb in town), not this neighborhood.” Wrench/filter guy: “well, my vote doesn’t count for anything, so why waste my time?”
i’d like to thank you all from refraining from pointing out my embrassing mathematical mistake above…
it’s not 30% of 60%… it’s 50% of 60%. which is 30% of the electorate (not less then 20%). sigh… i guess i shouldn’t post while liquored up, huh?
but, still, 30%? i say again: mandate my shiny metal butt!
we gotta do away with this winner-take-all system, no?
The Fletchman rant above is in fact spam. It’s being posted in the comments of lefty blogs all around the blogosphere.