- get that OUT of my face
- Feb 10, 2007
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Wait so futbal is also fascist? (I didn't read the article as the National Review sends me into sputtering fits of rage.)
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Jun 16, 2014 09:19
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- Adbot
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ADBOT LOVES YOU
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Apr 29, 2024 04:09
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- letthereberock
- Sep 4, 2004
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Why soccer is fascist/socialist/communist/un-American articles pop up like clockwork every 4 years in time for the World Cup and they are always terrible. At this point they are pretty much impossible to distinguish from parody.
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Jun 16, 2014 15:38
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- joepinetree
- Apr 5, 2012
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Why soccer is fascist/socialist/communist/un-American articles pop up like clockwork every 4 years in time for the World Cup and they are always terrible. At this point they are pretty much impossible to distinguish from parody.
There is also the "liberal" spin on the topic, where a "liberal" columnist tries to gain some cred with the exceptionalist crowd by claiming that Americans are too fair/honest/meritocratic to like soccer.
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Jun 16, 2014 15:49
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- get that OUT of my face
- Feb 10, 2007
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There is also the "liberal" spin on the topic, where a "liberal" columnist tries to gain some cred with the exceptionalist crowd by claiming that Americans are too fair/honest/meritocratic to like soccer.
In any case, both sides are wrong, since soccer is growing faster in popularity than any other sport and it's not going anywhere.
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Jun 17, 2014 03:17
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- MaxxBot
- Oct 6, 2003
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you could have clapped
you should have clapped!!
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I'm surprised that conservatives hate soccer so much considering how the FIFA leadership loves homophobia and slave labor.
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Jun 17, 2014 04:04
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- rkajdi
- Sep 11, 2001
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by LITERALLY AN ADMIN
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To be fair, a relegation/promotion system in North American sports would force perpetually lovely teams or teams that exist solely to make money for the owner (I'm looking at you, Miami Marlins) to actually have to spend money to compete on a yearly basis. Of course, this will never happen because anything that could lose money for owners is a no-go here.
IIRC, American football does this. There's both a salary cap and salary floor, and was put in place because one of the perennial poo poo teams (Cincinnati Bengals) was doing just that.
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Jun 17, 2014 04:04
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- Nintendo Kid
- Aug 4, 2011
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by Smythe
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I'm surprised that conservatives hate soccer so much considering how the FIFA leadership loves homophobia and slave labor.
Funny thing there, apparently the prisoners in Brazil who produce soccer balls among other things get higher pay than the highest-earning American prisoners:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/s...&pgtype=article
The workers earn $243 a month, 25% goes to the state leaving them with $182.25. A US prison worker maxes out at $170 a month.
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Jun 17, 2014 04:56
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- joepinetree
- Apr 5, 2012
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To be fair, a relegation/promotion system in North American sports would force perpetually lovely teams or teams that exist solely to make money for the owner (I'm looking at you, Miami Marlins) to actually have to spend money to compete on a yearly basis. Of course, this will never happen because anything that could lose money for owners is a no-go here.
In any case, both sides are wrong, since soccer is growing faster in popularity than any other sport and it's not going anywhere.
I think you misunderstood me (or were trying to quote someone else). I was referring to the recent stuff both on the nytimes and by that young Turks guy about how the game itself isn't popular in the US because Americans are too honest and meritocratic to partake in all the flopping and dishonesty of soccer. I.e., they also want to bash soccer for the populist appeal.
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Jun 17, 2014 06:36
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- Orange Devil
- Oct 1, 2010
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Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!
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Soccer might not be a huge spectator sport in the US, but isn't it a sport more people in the US actually play than say, american football? So you know, they do, presumably, actually partake in all the flopping and dishonesty.
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Jun 17, 2014 09:37
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- Tedd_Not_Ed
- Feb 16, 2014
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I've seen games go perfect for 12 innings all for naught. I've seen no-hitters pitched on illicit drugs. Homer streaks lasting eight games and 20 run losses. I've seen pennants won and seasons collapse. All these memories will be lost in time. Like tears in the rain.
Time to die.
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Soccer might not be a huge spectator sport in the US, but isn't it a sport more people in the US actually play than say, american football? So you know, they do, presumably, actually partake in all the flopping and dishonesty.
At least where I grew up, soccer was seen as the sport that you grew out of. A lot of our moms let/made us play it for either the local rec league or YMCA because they didn't want us getting hurt playing anything else. Once we finally got to a certain age most of us had either stopped sports or moved on to whatever sport we actually wanted to play such as basketball, baseball, peewee football, softball, or hockey and soccer became the sport equivelant of playing a recorder.
I'm going to assume that in many places this is also the case that soccer is seen as a sport for toddlers with worried parents
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Jun 17, 2014 14:04
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- KomradeX
- Oct 29, 2011
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So what's suppose to be so dishonest and unmeritocratic about soccer anyway?
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Jun 17, 2014 14:51
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- joepinetree
- Apr 5, 2012
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So what's suppose to be so dishonest and unmeritocratic about soccer anyway?
I'll let the NY Times take this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/16/sports/worldcup/for-us-soccer-team-honesty-may-not-be-the-best-policy.html?ref=worldcup&_r=0
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Jun 17, 2014 14:58
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- Pope Guilty
- Nov 6, 2006
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The human animal is a beautiful and terrible creature, capable of limitless compassion and unfathomable cruelty.
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He must not watch a lot of American football.
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Jun 17, 2014 15:50
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- Doktor Avalanche
- Dec 30, 2008
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At least where I grew up, soccer was seen as the sport that you grew out of. A lot of our moms let/made us play it for either the local rec league or YMCA because they didn't want us getting hurt playing anything else. Once we finally got to a certain age most of us had either stopped sports or moved on to whatever sport we actually wanted to play such as basketball, baseball, peewee football, softball, or hockey and soccer became the sport equivelant of playing a recorder.
I'm going to assume that in many places this is also the case that soccer is seen as a sport for toddlers with worried parents
If many places = USA & Canada, then you're right.
edit: the text you're quoting is talking about the US, so yeah, I reacted like a dumbass 
Doktor Avalanche fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Jun 18, 2014
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Jun 18, 2014 01:57
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- esto es malo
- Aug 3, 2006
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Don't want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard
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Local newspaper leans heavily conservative, especially in the Op Ed section, because most of the people in the area are old affluent white people with nothing but disdain for people under 50 or non-white. Usually I read through it to see whatever ham-fisted drivel is put out by this person or a elderly female libertarian since they tend to write in on a regular basis and I am a masochist, but this article today is pretty much peak senility so I had to share.
quote:June 24, 2014
Redistribution of wealth in U.S. is immoral
As I See It
Richard Astukewicz
---- — We are today living by an immoral principle that everything our government in Washington does is correct, right and just because Washington’s elite leaders have chosen to do it, and they tell you that it’s a moral duty for the common good of the society.
The common good takes the production from one man for the benefit of another and in that process it is not moral, it’s an immoral act.
The redistribution of wealth, as many economists call it, and they say it’s governments duty, is without doubt one of the most immoral actions taking place in our society today.
You get food stamps, Medicaid, rent and heating subsidies; you have all the social benefits society has created and you’re probably satisfied. But you know what? You’re still poor. That should tell you that your government has, in effect, failed you. Jobs and income would be more beneficial.
We cannot have endless handouts from government because it stifles man’s right to achieve by his efforts that which provides him a better living standard. The current liberalism, which is another step in the direction that has been designed to lead us down the road to socialism, is calling for massive federal expansion and massive uncontrollable federal debt to aid the citizens in need.
Because we are a constitutional republic, socialism could not replace our system or overthrow overnight our government. Instead, over the past 100 years and especially since F.D.R, liberals and progressive Democrats have hid their socialist agenda by simply using programs with solid and specific measures to create the large bureaucratic government with all its power, always avoiding the actual goal of socialism as a programmatic action taken for society’s “greater good” or “common good” or “public interest.”
Just in the years of President Obama’s term we have seen government create all forms of regulations and pressure groups via lobbyists call for more of the government pie; there seems to be no end to what these groups want from government despite the costs.
We have minorities opposing the majority, the young against us older folks, the poor against the middle class, women against men, welfare against the workers, claiming that there will be no chance for them until the rich are destroyed through taxation.
We have Wall Street against Main Street, the 99’ers vs. the 1percent, the have’s against the have not’s.
When President Obama talks about the redistribution of wealth to correct income inequality, he explicitly means that it is his wealth to distribute.
This is another tenet of socialism that my income, your income earned by our hard work for our freedom and happiness is now the right of the government to own and do what it deems pragmatic for the greater good of society to be distributed.
Where did this idea come from?
It came from the elite towers of our schools, from professors, economists, educators and intellectuals and as it was written in 1964 on the front page of the New York Times: “Every American should be guaranteed an adequate income as a matter of right, whether he works or not. Government should provide this right.” Who?
Government should provide this — do you realize “I” am the government, “you” are the government; are we now going to be working slaves?
All we hear today is tax the rich, the rich should pay their fair share. What is their fair share? Where and when does that fair share end?
All the rich will do is to stop investing their capital. Taxing the rich will amount to less investment, less production of goods and services, leading to a reduction in jobs.
This is a road to disaster.
America’s past (and its future) was (and should be) built by free men, like the pioneers of old who brought this nation to the heights of an unequaled quality of life.
They created jobs with higher wages, goods with quality at affordable prices; they brought us the scientific and technological achievements surpassing any nation in the history of man. All this was because of the freedom in a capitalist economy.
Capitalism made this nation and if we took government out of our economics and restored capitalism, there would be no need for 100,000,000 Americans getting some kind of government subsidy— a huge government failure.
---
Richard A. Astukewicz of Salisbury is a retired business manager.
Edit: In my own personally interests I tried to find out if this guy had a self-owned business or just was something ridiculous like the manager at a donut shop, but it keeps showing links to freep postings of his op-eds and that's even better.
esto es malo fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Jun 26, 2014
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Jun 26, 2014 02:09
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- Tacky-Ass Rococco
- Sep 7, 2010
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by R. Guyovich
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At least where I grew up, soccer was seen as the sport that you grew out of. A lot of our moms let/made us play it for either the local rec league or YMCA because they didn't want us getting hurt playing anything else. Once we finally got to a certain age most of us had either stopped sports or moved on to whatever sport we actually wanted to play such as basketball, baseball, peewee football, softball, or hockey and soccer became the sport equivelant of playing a recorder.
I'm going to assume that in many places this is also the case that soccer is seen as a sport for toddlers with worried parents
As an American who played soccer into his teens (I wasn't terribly good and bowed out before I embarrassed myself), soccer is a super fun game to play but even more boring than hockey to watch. I'm not narrow-minded, I try to be cosmopolitan, but I genuinely don't why people the world over willingly watch it on television. It's probably something that's baked into culture, like American football -- I like football, but I acknowledge that objectively the game is sort of absurd, inasmuch as three hours of viewing time are required for one hour of playing time.
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Jun 26, 2014 04:29
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- computer parts
- Nov 18, 2010
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PLEASE CLAP
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There are still probably more scores/minute in American Football than soccer though.
Really if you want to fix soccer (at least the stuff I've seen in the World Cup) you just make the field smaller and allow substitutions. It's way too easy to grind out time and prevent scores right now.
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Jun 26, 2014 04:34
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- Tacky-Ass Rococco
- Sep 7, 2010
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by R. Guyovich
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Really if you want to fix soccer (at least the stuff I've seen in the World Cup) you just make the field smaller and allow substitutions. It's way too easy to grind out time and prevent scores right now.
Indoor soccer is ideal for American audiences. But still, cultural inertia.
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Jun 26, 2014 05:31
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- Okuteru
- Nov 10, 2007
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Choose this life you're on your own
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There are still probably more scores/minute in American Football than soccer though.
Really if you want to fix soccer (at least the stuff I've seen in the World Cup) you just make the field smaller and allow substitutions. It's way too easy to grind out time and prevent scores right now.
This, and instant replays on fouls. Then again, seeing how FIFA is the most corrupt sports organization on earth, I wouldn't hold my breath.
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Jun 26, 2014 05:48
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- joepinetree
- Apr 5, 2012
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There are still probably more scores/minute in American Football than soccer though.
Really if you want to fix soccer (at least the stuff I've seen in the World Cup) you just make the field smaller and allow substitutions. It's way too easy to grind out time and prevent scores right now.
Or perhaps sports interest are based on culture and history and not stuff like "scores/minute."
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Jun 26, 2014 06:04
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- A Fancy 400 lbs
- Jul 24, 2008
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Or perhaps sports interest are based on culture and history and not stuff like "scores/minute."
You're clearly wrong, everyone knows the ideal sport is a single person seeing how many times they can run a ball into an undefended goal area.
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Jun 26, 2014 06:11
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- VideoTapir
- Oct 18, 2005
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He'll tire eventually.
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You're clearly wrong, everyone knows the ideal sport is a single person seeing how many times they can run a ball into an undefended goal area.
So kind of like golf.
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Jun 26, 2014 06:15
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- Teriyaki Hairpiece
- Dec 29, 2006
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I'm nae the voice o' the darkened thistle, but th' darkened thistle cannae bear the sight o' our Bonnie Prince Bernie nae mair.
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More fun views from The First State.
quote:
Worthless legislators seek to end rights
We are under the mistaken impression that we send representatives and senators to Dover and Washington to protect our rights and freedoms. All they seem to want, is to see their name in the legislative record for sponsoring a bill, any bill, no matter how mediocre or ill conceived. They have the ability to make law, therefore they think they must make law, wrong. The citizens are no longer falling for the hype of "look at how many bills I've gotten passed." We're looking at the effect and necessity of these bills, just ask Eric Cantor. Really, we all know how much criminals fear legislation, like gun-free zones. Criminals obey gun laws as well as most politicians honor their oath of office.
States that have the most restrictive gun legislation also have the highest gun-involved crime rates.
Criminals know the citizen has no legal ability to self protect. Criminals also know the well-prepared citizen can be very detrimental to their chosen career. The police can't protect you; only investigate after the crime has been committed. Let's try looking at states that have low gun-involved crime and investigate that – what a concept.
For those that don't want a weapon, that feel their life and the life of their family are not worth protecting, it's easy; don't buy a weapon. That's your right, but don't you dare to interfere with my God-given rights.
Richard McKinley
Fenwick Island
That one's a doozy.
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Jun 27, 2014 01:48
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- VideoTapir
- Oct 18, 2005
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He'll tire eventually.
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Just stumbled across this...
http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/economics/the-problem-with-relative-poverty/
quote:
The problem with relative poverty
Written by Tim Worstall | Sunday, August 12th, 2012 | Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Here actually is the problem with using relative poverty as a measure:
Compared to the 1960s, China today has higher income inequality,
but also incomparably lower levels of material poverty. By Brady’s
definition, China was less impoverished in the near-starvation years
of the 1960s than it is as an economic superpower today. According to
the OECD, during the last three decades the share of Chinese living
in absolute poverty dramatically declined from eight in ten to one in
ten (Garroway and de Laiglesia 2011). During the same period, relative
poverty, measured exactly as Brady measures it, roughly doubled.
Although inequality and relative poverty are not irrelevant for measuring
the well-being of a society, we should be apprehensive about a measure
of poverty that is incapable of detecting the largest decline in material
poverty in human history.
As pointed out, a measure of poverrty that not just ignores, but actually gets the sign wrong on, the largest reduction in poverty in the history of our species is of limited value.
Not of no value: as Adam Smith's linen shirt example shows. If you can't afford a linen shirt, but not being able to afford a linen shirt marks you out as being poor, then in that society you are poor if you cannot afford a linen shirt. But as our Chinese example shows only worrying about relative poverty is simply nuts.
Which leads us to something of a conclusion: it's fine to consider the distribution of incomes within a society. But we do it rather too much with the constant political obsession over relative poverty. We need to be paying a lot more attention to absolute standards of living: most especially how these change over time. Most specifically I'm thinking about the effects attempts to reduce relative poverty might affect our ability to increase absolute standards of living in the future.
For as ever in economics there is actually no solution. There are only a series of trade offs. We could, obviously, confiscate all of everyone's money and share it out equally. This is not going to make our children richer than ourselves equally obviously. Similarly, no one at all is suggesting that there should be no taxation at all to aid the lame and the halt of our society even if that might increase future growth rates. It's a matter of balance and to my mind there's much too much attention being paid to the relative part and not enough on the absolute incomes of the future.
They're like the UK's version of the Heritage Foundation, right?
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Jul 12, 2014 23:58
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- Badger of Basra
- Jul 26, 2007
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I think we've found another issue Jonathan Chait cannot be allowed to write about : education reform. The other current entry on the list is race. He also really doesn't like Diane Ravitch.
First link posted:
The Vergara precedent would force California — and possibly other states, which will see similar lawsuits — to abandon tenure rules that protect ineffective teachers. Even if the direct legal strategy is reversed by higher courts, it embarrasses the unions by highlighting both the least-defensible aspect of their agenda and its most sympathetic victims. Duncan praised the ruling, further enraging unions and their supporters. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, who has attempted to conciliate the administration, wrote a protest letter requesting better “leadership.” Ravitch replied, sharply and not inaccurately, that Duncan is not a wavering ally but an enemy. (“Duncan showed that he IS a leader,” she wrote, “a leader in the effort to strip teachers of due process and a leader in the well-funded campaign to erode public confidence in public schools.”)
He'll probably be calling her hysterical soon.
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Jul 16, 2014 00:09
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- VideoTapir
- Oct 18, 2005
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He'll tire eventually.
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Charles Krauthammer posted:Israel accepts an Egyptian-proposed Gaza ceasefire; Hamas keeps firing. Hamas deliberately aims rockets at civilians; Israel painstakingly tries to avoid them, actually telephoning civilians in the area and dropping warning charges, so-called roof knocking.
“Here’s the difference between us,” explains the Israeli prime minister. “We’re using missile defense to protect our civilians and they’re using their civilians to protect their missiles.”
Rarely does international politics present a moment of such moral clarity. Yet we routinely hear this Israel–Gaza fighting described as a morally equivalent “cycle of violence.” This is absurd. What possible interest can Israel have in cross-border fighting? Everyone knows Hamas set off this mini-war. And everyone knows Hamas’s proudly self-declared raison d’être: the eradication of Israel and its Jews.
Advertisement
Apologists for Hamas attribute the bloodlust to the Israeli occupation and blockade. Occupation? There is not a soldier, not a settler, not a single Israeli in Gaza. Does no one remember anything? It was less than ten years ago that worldwide television showed the Israeli army pulling diehard settlers off synagogue roofs in Gaza as Israel uprooted it settlements, expelled its citizens, withdrew its military, and turned every inch of Gaza over to the Palestinians.
There was no blockade. On the contrary. Israel wanted this new Palestinian state to succeed. To help the Gaza economy, Israel gave the Palestinians its 3,000 greenhouses that had produced fruit and flowers for export. It opened border crossings and encouraged commerce.
The whole idea was to establish the model for two states living peacefully and productively side by side. No one seems to remember that simultaneous with the Gaza withdrawal, Israel dismantled four smaller settlements in the northern West Bank as a clear signal of Israel’s desire to leave the West Bank too and thus achieve an amicable two-state solution.
And how did the Gaza Palestinians react to being granted by the Israelis what no previous ruler, neither Egyptian, nor British, nor Turkish, had ever given them — an independent territory? First, they demolished the greenhouses. Then they elected Hamas. Then, instead of building a state with its attendant political and economic institutions, they spent the better part of a decade turning Gaza into a massive military base, brimming with terror weapons, to make ceaseless war on Israel.
Where are the roads and rail, the industry and infrastructure of the new Palestinian state? Nowhere. Instead, they built mile upon mile of underground tunnels to hide their weapons and, when the going gets tough, their military commanders. They spent millions importing and producing rockets, launchers, mortars, small arms, even drones. They deliberately placed them in schools, hospitals, mosques, and private homes to better expose their own civilians. And from which they fire rockets at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
Why? The rockets can’t even inflict serious damage, being almost uniformly intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system. Even West Bank leader Mahmoud Abbas has asked: “What are you trying to achieve by sending rockets?”
It makes no sense. Unless you understand, as a Washington Post editorial explained, that the whole point is to draw Israeli counterfire.
This produces dead Palestinians for international television. Which is why Hamas perversely urges its own people not to seek safety when Israel drops leaflets warning of an imminent attack.
To deliberately wage war so that your own people can be telegenically killed is indeed moral and tactical insanity. But it rests on a very rational premise: Given the Orwellian state of the world’s treatment of Israel (see: the U.N.’s grotesque Human Rights Council), fueled by a mix of classic anti-Semitism, near-total historical ignorance, and reflexive sympathy for the ostensible Third World underdog, these eruptions featuring Palestinian casualties ultimately undermine support for Israel’s legitimacy and right to self-defense.
In a world of such Kafkaesque ethical inversions, Hamas’ depravity begins to make sense. This is a world in which the Munich massacre is a movie and the murder of Klinghoffer is an opera — both deeply sympathetic to the killers. This is a world in which the U.N. ignores humanity’s worst war criminals while incessantly condemning Israel, a state warred upon for 66 years which nonetheless goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid harming the very innocents its enemies use as shields.
It’s to the Israelis’ credit that amid all this madness they haven’t lost their moral scruples. Or their nerve. Those outside the region have the minimum obligation, therefore, to expose the madness and speak the truth. Rarely has it been so blindingly clear.
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Jul 20, 2014 08:06
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- Teriyaki Hairpiece
- Dec 29, 2006
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I'm nae the voice o' the darkened thistle, but th' darkened thistle cannae bear the sight o' our Bonnie Prince Bernie nae mair.
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I'm sure everyone's sick of me posting crazy letters from Delaware, the most liberal state in the country, but this one is utterly insane.
quote:
Immigration or invasion at US borders?
What is going on in the southwest U.S. is nothing short of an invasion across the U.S. borders. Yes, these people might be trying to find a better/safer situation, but this is not the way. It is certainly not the way immigrants came into the U.S. over 150 years ago from Ireland, Italy, Germany and elsewhere.
What has to be done for those not sent back:
• Southwest governors must secure their borders.
• These individuals must be documented coming in, and a timeline on where they go, and what they are doing.
• Not all are children. As media pictures show, many are teenagers and adults.
• Everyone should have to pass a medical exam.
• Females 10 and older should be required to have birth control administered.
• Those 5 or older should immediately start learning English language and other education.
If anyone thinks they are going to be safer here, take a close look at the violence and gangs in L.A., Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta – and our own Wilmington.
Nolan Williams
Milford
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Jul 20, 2014 11:36
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- Teriyaki Hairpiece
- Dec 29, 2006
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I'm nae the voice o' the darkened thistle, but th' darkened thistle cannae bear the sight o' our Bonnie Prince Bernie nae mair.
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No, I understand where the guy is getting that position, with all the recent conservative hysteria surrounding "invasion by birth canal", I'm just trying to wrap my head around the fact that the author wants an America where the government polices the uterus of a 10 year old, or that the person who wrote that letter, who probably believes themselves a patriot, thinks that the true America is a place where that kind of fascist control over daily life should happen.
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Jul 20, 2014 11:51
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- razorrozar
- Feb 21, 2012
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by Cyrano4747
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That came up in the Conservapedia thread a couple weeks ago, actually. I'll quote myself from then:
Oh, I know that. I was saying that he has such a terminal case of cognitive dissonance that he probably doesn't even realize his ideal society is virtually indistinguishable from his worst nightmares. You can bet in Schlaflytopia they'd be "morality guides" or some poo poo like that because it's totally not fascism if you call it something else*.
*truth
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Jul 20, 2014 11:56
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- computer parts
- Nov 18, 2010
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PLEASE CLAP
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Or perhaps sports interest are based on culture and history and not stuff like "scores/minute."
"I like this boring game because heritage but your game is boring because people aren't running around literally doing nothing for an hour and a half".
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Jul 20, 2014 16:32
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- A Fancy 400 lbs
- Jul 24, 2008
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Sure, if you could carry the golf ball over to the hole and drop it in.
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Jul 21, 2014 00:31
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- MaxxBot
- Oct 6, 2003
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you could have clapped
you should have clapped!!
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Hey guys I have a totally brand new argument against same-sex marriage that you've surely never seen before!
http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/07/why-gay-rights-are-not-the-new-civil-rights
quote:
Supporters of same-sex marriage love to make analogies to the African American Civil Rights Movement. Analogies are rhetorical devices that require careful scrutiny. While I do not find the attempt to connect bans on gay marriage to miscegenation laws persuasive, nevertheless there is nothing inherently wrong in trying to find parallels between these two social movements. In that spirit, let me offer my own reflections on what we can learn by comparing them.
Rather than beginning with a description of the Civil Rights movement and then looking for similarities to gay rights, my arguments goes in the opposite direction. That is, I begin with the extraordinary success of gay marriage advocacy and then ask what the Civil Rights movement would have looked like if it had followed the gay rights strategy.
First, then, let’s quickly recap that strategy. In a remarkably short period of time, gay marriage advocates have convinced millions of Americans that gay marriage is just the same as straight marriage. Gays thus deserve the right to marry because gay marriage will do nothing to damage or alter that revered institution. Put differently, the definition of marriage can be expanded without any negative consequences for society.
The aspect of this strategy that is relevant for my argument is its emphasis on sameness. Gay marriage is just as good (just as morally straight, we could say) as straight marriage. Therefore, denying gays this fundamental right is just as arbitrary as denying blacks their civil rights.
If the argument of sameness works for gay rights, could it have worked for Civil Rights? Imagine the following “alternative history.” It is the early sixties, and while it should be obvious to everyone that all human beings are the same in every important respect, racism is alive and well. The white political leaders most sympathetic to the plight of African Americans decide to make the case for this moral sameness by arguing that black people are really white. “Look past their skin,” they say, “and you will find that they are just as white as we are.” This argument is so effective that the discourse about race in America changes nearly overnight. Anyone who wants to talk about the distinctiveness of African American culture is accused of racism. Even black leaders who want to draw attention to black history and its unique challenges and achievements are shut down. There is no black pride movement, no discussion of the particularity of black culture, and no effort to find room in public discourse to reflect on the uniqueness of black life in America. Blacks continue to have their own history and culture, but those differences cannot be named, analyzed, and celebrated. For the purposes of social justice, blacks have become white.
Civil rights, of course, were not won in that fashion, and it is a good thing, too. White America had to learn to recognize not just black rights but also black lives, including their views on American history and their contributions to American culture. Blacks did not win civil rights because they are really white, and they did not have to give up their blackness to become full members of the American experience. Moral sameness did not eclipse historical and cultural differences.
That is not the case with the gay marriage debate. Gay couples who want to marry, according to their advocates—especially their straight advocates—are just the same as straight couples. Their pursuit of monogamy, their desire for children, their rites of courtship and reverence for tradition are no different from what goes on in the heterosexual world.
The result of this rhetorical strategy is the unofficial (and in many cases, official) banning of any discussion of the differences between gay and straight relationships. Everyone knows there are differences, but they are treated as insignificant and irrelevant for public debate. Worse, those who point out these differences are tagged with a label—homophobia—that puts them in the ranks of racists.
Gay marriage has won widespread support, but at the cost of erasing what makes homosexuality different from heterosexuality. Gay love has its own history, and gays can be rightly proud that their struggles to survive in hostile conditions has often taken the form of extraordinary cultural creativity. None of that can be acknowledged if homosexuals and heterosexuals experience their sexuality in the same ways.
But of course, they don’t. Gay sex should not be treated as if it were really straight sex. That, however, is exactly what the sameness rhetoric does, even though its most basic assumption is rarely if ever spelled out. That assumption is so bold, so counterintuitive, and so unbelievable that it must not be made explicit, even though the entire gay marriage appeal rests upon it: The anus is the same as the vagina. The most intimate act of self-giving, of penetration, in homosexuality is just as sacred, just as physically and psychologically healthy, just as fecund, just as spiritually uplifting, just as mutually pleasurable, and just as tenderly beautiful as the sexual intercourse of a heterosexual couple. I don’t think very many people really believe that, but as long as it is not stated, it cannot be discussed, and as long as it is not discussed, it cannot be denied.
Bonus post by the author in the comments section.
quote:
Thanks for those thoughts, Aaron. I was hoping my position would resonate with some (many?) in the gay community who resist assimilating the cultural expressions and social structures that emerge from the distinctiveness of gay sexuality with the experiences of the straight world.
Gays can't marry because dicks and butts are icky, and lesbians don't exist! Also, many gay people support this well crafted and thought out argument.
It should be noted that this isn't some random rear end in a top hat's blog, First Things is supposed to be a website for intellectual discussions of topics related to Catholicism, and the right-wing Catholics who visit this site actually think this qualifies as deep theological discussion.
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Jul 23, 2014 05:02
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I think that if it was possible for someone to wake up one day and find out their son was black and this demonic other they hated was actually an incredibly close loved one, then yes, the civil rights movement would have moved along much more quickly.
Also 'we can't let the disgusting anus loving gays to marry because it will destroy their beautiful subculture" is one of the stranger mishmash of different argument I've encountered.
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Jun 16, 2014 09:19
