Prop 8 pushback

If the election were held today, Prop8 would probably lose. (So where was this energy BEFORE the election?)


H/T Mike in Texas

Update: Here's an interesting suggestion to continue the pushback:

Yesterday I called a woman’s spouse her boyfriend. She says, correcting me, “He’s my husband,” “Oh,” I say, “I no longer recognize marriage.”

The impact is obvious......Fun. And instant, eyebrow-raising recognition. Suddenly the majority gets to feel what the minority feels. In a moment they feel what it’s like to have their relationship downgraded, and to have a much taken-for-granted right called into question because of another’s beliefs.

Electoral Shifts

The New York Times has fascinating maps on the election and who voted how. Click on the link to see more.

The Mormons and Prop8

From the San Diego Union Trib (which itself came out against Prop8):

Mormons are being asked by their church leaders to step up their already considerable efforts to pass a ballot initiative to ban same-sex marriage in California.

Senior elders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints made a televised appeal to members Wednesday night and laid out a week-by-week strategy for boosting Mormon involvement before the Nov. 4 election.

....Mormons have been active participants in the campaign both as volunteers and financial contributors, giving $8.4 million to the Proposition 8 campaign, according to the Web site mormonsfor8.com.....

During Wednesday's taped satellite broadcast, church leaders asked for 30 members from each California congregation to donate four hours of week to the campaign. They also called on young married couples and single Mormons to use the Internet by text messaging and blogging to help pass the initiative.

and from our side?

A few lonely voices. Check out the new blog from Fr Geoff Farrow, who is waiting to be fired from the RC church for opposing Prop8. Over at James' site, he describes manning the anti-Prop8 booth at a farmer's marker. Susan Russell is feverishly doing local events with characteristic passion. Of course the Episcopal bishops had a nice news conference. But in terms of organized faith communities actively joining together to oppose Prop 8, the hate amendment?

::crickets::

Prop8 problems

New poll suggests that younger voters are shifting to support Prop8--the amendment to ban gay marriage in CA. The latest poll suggests that it may actually pass.

Keep IT's marriage legal: donate now!

Clearwater 1933?

From Dana Milbank in the Washington Post:

Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater [FL], arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media."

So, it's the fault of the QUESTIONS? So she thinks interviewers are not supposed to ask questions?

At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

(emphasis mine). Why is this not on national news? Why aren't people reacting with outrage? This isn't democracy in action. This is cynical demagoguery. The article continues:

Palin, speaking to a sea of "Palin Power" and "Sarahcuda" T-shirts, tried to link Obama to the 1960s Weather Underground. "One of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers," she said. ("Boooo!" said the crowd.) "And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,' " she continued. ("Boooo!" the crowd repeated.)

"Kill him!" proposed one man in the audience.

Palin did not reprimand the man. When an audience member for a McCain appearance called Obama a terrorist, McCain did not correct him either. They are inciting assassination.

By the way, the New York Times, far from supporting Palin's accusations, pointed out that there is little evidence for any meaningful association between Ayers and Obama, just casual interactions. Indeed Ayers' ties with domestic terrorism are in the distant past. Obama and I are almost the same age. We were children in the 1960s when Ayers was a radical; Obama met him 26 years after the fact. The McCain camp is lying, knowingly and deliberately.

The deliberate lies, the veiled slanders, the incitement to violence against "the other", the touting of "Country first": this is not conservatism. This it not Repbulicanism. This is certainly not American. It is deeply disturbing and cynical pursuit of power. (You can see the same strategy at work in the hard-right attacking your presiding bishop; see the comments to the post below.) I am sure I am not the only one with an interest in history who looks back at the utter economic collapse of Germany in the 1930s, and sees disturbing parallels with the Nuremberg rallies. Only this time, it will be blacks and gays they go after first.

Defining liberal values as Catholic values.

From the NY Times: the Democrats contest the Catholic vote:

In a departure from previous elections, Democrats and liberal Catholic groups are waging a fight within the [Roman Catholic] church, arguing that the Democratic Party better reflects the full spectrum of church teachings......

The escalating efforts by more-liberal Catholics are provoking a vigorous backlash from some bishops and the right......

Conservatives argue that ending legal protections for abortion outweighs almost all other issues, while liberals contend that social programs can more effectively reduce the abortion rate than trying to overturn Supreme Court precedents. They cite a 2007 statement from the United States bishops explicitly condoning a vote for a candidate who supports abortion rights if the vote was cast for other “grave” reasons......

In the aftermath of the 2004 election, many liberal Catholics complained that parishes had distributed millions of copies of a voter guide created by a group called Catholic Answers that highlighted five “nonnegotiable” issues: abortion, stem-cell research, human cloning, euthanasia and same-sex marriage.

In response, liberal groups like Catholics United and Catholics in Alliance quickly began preparing alternative guides emphasizing a broader spectrum of the church’s social justice teachings.

Then the Bishops Conference, perhaps to forestall a blizzard of competing pamphlets, all but banned third-party voter guides from parishes, requiring the explicit endorsement of the presiding bishop.

But some, including the bishop of La Crosse in Wisconsin, a swing state, have nevertheless chosen to authorize distribution of the “nonnegotiable” guides this year. The liberal groups are trying to distribute their material through direct mail and at meetings of lay Catholic groups....

Read the whole thing.

So here's my puzzle. I'm marrying a very active Catholic, and a whole slew of Catholics will attend our wedding with no problem. In fact, most of the Catholics I know are impressive social-justice Catholics, who defend the powerless, feed the hungry, and visit the imprisoned, etc etc and are very supportive of us. I actually don't know their views on abortion, but suspect that many are similar to my partner, who is personally opposed but unwilling to impose her religion on others nor elevate it to an election issue, and who considers that preventing the NEED for abortion is something upon which we can all agree and towards which we can all work.

The puzzle? Why does everyone think all Catholics are conservatives being pushed by one side or the other? I'm sure that some of the older people in the parish are conservative, and the clergy, but lots of people in our cohort (we're in our 40s) certainly identify as progressives or liberals. It seems that Catholics quite cheerfully live lives of Don't Ask Don't Tell, which I suppose is not surprising in an authoritarian institution!

Stop Dog Whistle Racism

A site to watch:
Center for Social Inclusion CSI Announces New Project StopDogWhistleRacism.

Here at the Center for Social Inclusion, we just went live with StopDogWhistleRacism.com, a project to monitor symbolic racism, and to help organizations and ordinary folks do something about it. StopDogWhistleRacism.com is a nonpartisan research project – sadly, nobody has a monopoly on symbolic racism – that monitors political discussions, from mayoral elections to the presidential race, creating an ongoing record of how race is used in electoral and policy debates, and how race and symbolic racism is discussed. Please click the link to check out our site, and come back often for the latest on symbolic racism in this historic electoral season.

Stop Dog Whistle Racism is an important resource in laying bare the strategy that, too often, is lost in discussion of individual ads, speeches or attacks. We hope that it will be used by journalists and others who are interested in writing about symbolic racism, and in understanding the context for specific incidents they cover. We also hope that you will find it useful, and that you will pitch in by sending us information about examples of symbolic racism that you come across, especially incidents in your communities that we might otherwise miss.

By the way, if you are on Facebook, search for our group there.

Stop Dog Whistle Racism will soon include tools to help you spot symbolic racism and challenge it. These will be added in the next week or so, so stay tuned for our next update.

Dog-Whistle Racism is political campaigning or policy-making that uses coded words and themes to appeal to conscious or subconscious racist concepts and frames. For example, the concepts ‘welfare queen,’ ’states’ rights,’ ‘Islamic terrorist,’ ‘uppity,’ 'thug,' 'tough on crime,' and ‘illegal alien’ all activate racist concepts that that have already been planted in the public consciousness and now are being activated by purposeful or accidental campaign activities, media coverage, public policy and cultural traditions. So, what’s dog whistle racism? It’s pure political theater to push buttons to win elections and policies. We’re here to identify, expose and respond to it.

From the NYT's: religious Prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice.

I'm going to post Kristof's article here.

The Push to ‘Otherize’ Obama
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Here’s a sad monument to the sleaziness of this presidential campaign: Almost one-third of voters “know” that Barack Obama is a Muslim or believe that he could be.

In short, the political campaign to transform Mr. Obama into a Muslim is succeeding. The real loser as that happens isn’t just Mr. Obama, but our entire political process.

A Pew Research Center survey released a few days ago found that only half of Americans correctly know that Mr. Obama is a Christian. Meanwhile, 13 percent of registered voters say that he is a Muslim, compared with 12 percent in June and 10 percent in March.

More ominously, a rising share — now 16 percent — say they aren’t sure about his religion because they’ve heard “different things” about it.

When I’ve traveled around the country, particularly to my childhood home in rural Oregon, I’ve been struck by the number of people who ask something like: That Obama — is he really a Christian? Isn’t he a Muslim or something? Didn’t he take his oath of office on the Koran?

In conservative Christian circles and on Christian radio stations, there are even widespread theories that Mr. Obama just may be the Antichrist. Seriously.

John Green, of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, says that about 10 percent of Americans believe we may be in the Book of Revelation’s “end times” and are on the lookout for the Antichrist. A constant barrage of e-mail and broadcasts suggest that Mr. Obama just may be it.

The online Red State Shop sells T-shirts, mugs and stickers exploiting the idea. Some shirts and stickers portray a large “O” with horns, above a caption: “The Anti-Christ.”

To his credit, Mr. McCain himself has never raised doubts about Mr. Obama’s religion. But a McCain commercial last month mimicked the words and imagery of the best-selling Christian “Left Behind” book series in ways that would have set off alarm bells among evangelicals nervous about the Antichrist.

Mr. McCain himself is not popular with evangelicals. But they will vote for him if they think the other guy may be on Satan’s side.

In fact, of course, Mr. Obama took his oath on the Bible, not — as the rumors have it — on the Koran. He is far more active in church than John McCain is.

(Just imagine for a moment if it were the black candidate in this election, rather than the white candidate, who was born in Central America, was an indifferent churchgoer, had graduated near the bottom of his university class, had dumped his first wife, had regularly displayed an explosive and profane temper, and had referred to the Pakistani-Iraqi border ...)

What is happening, I think, is this: religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian.

The result is this campaign to “otherize” Mr. Obama. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there’s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him.

Raising doubts about a candidate based on the religion of his grandfather is toxic and profoundly un-American, cracking the melting pot we emerged from. Someday people will look back at the innuendoes about Mr. Obama with the same disgust with which we regard the smears of Al Smith as a Catholic candidate in 1928.

I’m writing in part out of a sense of personal responsibility. Those who suggest that Mr. Obama is a Muslim — as if that in itself were wrong — regularly cite my own columns, especially an interview last year in which I asked him about Islam and his boyhood in Indonesia. In that interview, Mr. Obama praised the Arabic call to prayer as “one of the prettiest sounds on earth at sunset,” and he repeated the opening of it.

This should surprise no one: the call to prayer blasts from mosque loudspeakers five times a day, and Mr. Obama would have had to have been deaf not to learn the words as a child. But critics, like Jerome Corsi, whose book denouncing Mr. Obama, “The Obama Nation,” is No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list, quote from that column to argue that Mr. Obama has mysterious ties to Islam. I feel a particular obligation not to let my own writing be twisted so as to inflame bigotry and xenophobia.

Journalists need to do more than call the play-by-play this election cycle. We also need to blow the whistle on such egregious fouls calculated to undermine the political process and magnify the ugliest prejudices that our nation has done so much to overcome.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and to join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.

Here I am all..just doing my part to blow the whistle on some ugliness. Discuss amongst yourselves! Thoughts?