BRAZENLY LIBERAL — a fact-based initiative

AARGH! I hate oversleeping. I like to ease gently into the day. Jumping out of bed and rushing around leaves me foggy-brained and irritable for a good part of the morning.

Waiting for the coffee to kick in and jumpstart said brain, I am essentially on automatic pilot this morning. Normally, I wouldn’t think of trying to communicate with human beings while in this condition, but Terance Heath has gotten me all riled up, so blame him if BL is more muddled than usual.

A few days ago, Terance wrote a thoughtful and thought provoking blog on his experience at YearlyKos. Quoting the meaningful, relevant bits would mean reproducing the entire thing (bad blog etiquette, eh?), so let’s go with this :

…just getting Democrats elected is not sufficient. Certainly not if their going to put their constituents and the convictions in the closet in order to win. A party that believes it has to put its own values on the back burner in order to win must not believe that it can and should win based on its values. It becomes something else entirely, and will find it hard to go back if the trick should work…

It’s been rattling around my head ever since. As we vet the candidates, we have to ask ourselves two very basic questions and I’ve been asking them of myself over the past few days:

1. Are we ready to be driven by a single issue, any single issue?
2. How many deal-breaker issues can we reasonably have?

This morning, still mulling it over, I cruised over to Republic of T. again and saw this:

Apparently, the days of book burning are upon us again.

Following the link, I expected to find some yokel shock jock in Gorgos, Alabama had staged a stupid PR stunt piggybacking on the even stupider proposed Federal Marriage Amendment.

But no. This happened in Chicago, just blocks away from where I grew up in the shadow of Wrigley Field. At a public library on a busy street in a largely gay neighborhood at high noon. And as in-your-face as that is, the news story only says it “may” be a hate crime.

“May”

Well, I suppose that until all the facts are in, we do need to allow that it may have been the case that someone was doing research for a doctoral thesis on Stonewall and became so incensed at reading the long history of homophobia in America that spontaneous human combustion started the fire.

Erm, sure.

Just being a Democrat is not enough, Terance says, and he’s right. The only reason to support the Democratic party is that they stand for what we believe is right. I’m not sure yet how many deal-breaker issues it would be reasonable or wise to hold to. But I am sure where I come down on the single issue question.

I’m one of those who has maintained that a Democrat, almost any Democrat, is better than any Republican this fall. Joe Lieberman aside, that’s almost true.

Almost.

But Terance (damn him for waking me up this early!) has made me rethink and reevaluate. I’ve had to reexamine my own motives and I found that my despair at what the Bushies have done to America had led me down a dicey path. I had allowed myself to equivocate on something that had always been a deal-breaker for me.

No more. We’ve been here before and it sucked then and it sucks now. In the past, demanding rights for people of color and for women wasn’t any more popular among the appeasers than demanding rights for the GLBT community is today.  Civil Rights is a basic, fundamental, rock bottom, non-negotiable, I-cannot-believe-it’s-up-for-question issue. Period. Gay rights are not a special interest issue. They are not a niche issue. They are not an I-me-mine issue. Gay rights are civil rights. End of story.

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