I don’t believe that Republicans lack imagination; I believe that they just don’t give a damn unless it touches them or theirs.
]]>It doesn’t. I don’t know anyone in my extended family who is LGBTQ. That doesn’t mean there isn’t someone, only that they’re not out to me. As many of my relatives are country folk, I suspect it would be difficult for them to come out [/broad_generalization]. To learn compassion for gays requires, first and foremost, to learn compassion for people, people both the same as and different from oneself.
Times are changing. I expect to see, probably within my lifetime (I’m in my mid-60s) and certainly within yours, Bobby, an America in which all but the most extreme (religious?) nut-jobs are tolerant of gays. And if you can’t have love, tolerance is at least a lot better than hostility.
]]>There are days I think that for most of the Reichwing, that’s the only way for them to learn these things. Count me in with FC and Frank: I’m not especially impressed by a Conservatist pol who thought that second-class citizenry was perfectly acceptable for Those people until he learned one of his own offspring was included. Portman rates a BTYFO but not much more than that – though I’m a lot less inclined to cross the street rather than run into him than I was only a week or so ago.
I have no problem with Portman taking two years from discovering he has a gay child to rethink his stance on SSM. I have a real problem with his two decades in politics, most of that spent representing the people, and failing to allow that some of those people were being hurt by his ignorance and bigotry – and that it took a direct, personal experience for him to realise that just maybe he might not have been doing the right thing when the evidence has been plain in his district and state for at least that long.
I will think a lot better of these volk when they come up with a believable excuse for carrying on as they did while there were people losing their jobs and careers, their homes, their health and their lives not so many years ago. Does having an LGBT child make them realise that, not only are their policies hurting their own family, but that they’ve hurt other families far more in their careers? Does admitting that they might have been wrong on certain specific items absolve them of years of actively enabling those who let LGBT folks be descriminated against and allowed to suffer for no better reason than we were Those people? Whatever they come up with to answer this had better be more than “well, it suddenly impacted my family” as Portman admits: after all, they’re supposedly in politics to represent the people and not just the folks that funded their campaigns, and for decades they’ve been failing pretty impressively when it comes to even so much as recognizing that LGBT folk do indeed form part of their constituencies.
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