Obama, Romney, the gay electorate, and the press
Obama’s declaration about gay marriage is getting an unbelievable amount of press.
It’s as though it actually means something, other than that for some reason Obama has decided to abandon his pretense of being against gay marriage. It’s being framed as everything from a political profile in courage—following his conscience even though it will hurt him with voters—to a ploy to placate gay backers and rake in more money. I think it’s the latter, plus a need to shore up his base—a political calculation, just as his previous antagonism to gay marriage was a political calculation. And in that, he’s not much different from many politicians, although a bit smoother and cynical than some.
And I don’t think Joe Biden’s preparatory remarks were a slip-up or an accident.
That said, I don’t think it will affect much in this election, despite the enormous brouhaha. How many voters will change their minds because of this? I can’t imagine it would be many.
As expected, for the most part the press has dutifully jumped on board. Not only are there the usual fawning tributes to Obama, but there’s been a full court press to paint Romney as not only against gay marriage but guilty of bigotry against gays. It’s been quite carefully orchestrated, I think, beginning with blaming Romney for the resignation of his gay foreign policy advisor Richard Grennell, and now the ludicrous dredging-up of somebody’s memories of something Romney supposedly said to some gay kid in the classroom back in the mid-60s.
This is what the WaPo calls big news these days. And if it were about Obama instead, you better believe it would be under lock and key, like his grades, or something like this, an incident that happened not in high school but in 2003, and is not a rumor but a videotape.
The best comment about the Romney revelations was this one in a thread at Althouse, by “Pastafarian”:
I’ve also heard, from unnamed sources, that in second grade, [Mitt] pulled the pigtails of the girl seated in front of him — her eyes welling with tears. The War on Women was being waged even then.
The really disgusting thing about all this is that Obama doesn’t care about gays or anyone but himself.
Obama is now a full time fundraiser for himself. So let’s see what else might be on the agenda?
1. Crappy Economy: No action
2. Iran Nukes: No real action/harrass Israeli’s
3. High Energy Prices: Keep greens happy to get donations.
4. Heath Care Financing Disaster: Blame Supreme Court to please extreme lefties for donations.
5.High Deficits: Do nothing and scare social security recipients.
Far away from the election, he could duck actions with less risk politically. But now his daily press releases start to look buffoonish to event the most lefty independents.
The original Gettysburg address has been found. There is a three-word difference, as follows:
“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here — on my behalf.”
Obama’s gay marriage proposal is indicative of desperation setting in.
Somewhere out there poll numbers show him seriously behind Romney, not vis-é -vis Romney’s strengths but his own negatives. Polls for public consumption have been inflating Obama’s numbers in a desperate attempt to float Obama’s competitiveness. There’s nothing that’ll jump a listing ship faster than front-running rats that find themselves on the Wrong Side Of History.
I just hope that somewhere, somehow, somebody has BHO’s academic files, or some similar piece of evidence that we all know is being buried.
All of us here have long known he is not what he seems, and all he does is for his own advancement with the MSM carrying the water.
We also know that come close to the election his team has something big planned for Romney. The Republicans have to have some large ammunition to fire back because the rounds are already incoming from the Dems; and we’re are still 5 months+ away from the election.
This is going to get just plain nasty.
Despite the several decade effort, driven and orchestrated by the Left (heavily represented in the homosexual community), and part of the Left’s broad spectrum Gramscian attack against all bourgeoisie societies, intended to convince ordinary people that homosexuality is normal, even a healthy way to live, despite the ubiquitous and enormously influential works of the hardly neutral and objective Dr. (of entomology, no less, and an acknowledged expert on the “Gall Wasp”) Kinsey in his massively skewed, deceptive, and phony ”scientific” studies and statistics presented in “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” and “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,” despite hardly neutral and objective Margaret Mead’s couple of months of supposed “scientific observations,” concerning child rearing, family structure and behavior, and human sexuality, whose conclusions were laid out in “Coming of Age in Samoa,” despite homosexual’s gaming/intimidating the APA into delisting homosexuality as an illness, despite the inflated claims for high percentages of the population as being homosexual, and despite the reframing of homosexuality as a “human rights” issue, traditionalist and old fossil that I am, I still happen to think that marriage is between a man and a woman, and that marriage and procreation are the sina qua non of a stable and successful society. And, moreover, that an increase in and the acceptance of homosexuality is an indicator of social disintegration, decadence, and eventual collapse–see Rome.
The whole thing has been orchestrated. It’s revolting.
Doesn’t ANYONE in the mainstream media question the fact that a several-thousand word “investigative report” on a high school prank that (allegedly) happened half a century ago immediately appears in the WaPo after Obama’s “profile in courage”….”historic”…announcement?
Are there any real journalists out there anymore?
I have a couple of left wing friends who are posting about this on FB. One is a gay man I worked with several years back, who I now think to be one of the pettiest, nasty people on earth. Not because he’s gay, but in the fact that anyone opposed to gay marriage is clearly a hater. An honest difference of opinion is not allowed.
I have no desires to put forth any of my positions, but it really bothers me how these things turn out to be. I still like him enough as a person, and don’t dislike him as a person, but seeing how he thinks of people like me, well….
I have now seen two headlines saying that Romney has apologized for his “bullying.” Considering the way that word has been loaded over the past few years, its use is surely not an accident.
I’ve had that experience several times, JuliB.
I happen to despise leftist. If you’re a gay bisexual transvestite version of the same, i despise you too.
Hmm.
I agree the timing is suspicious. I think the Post was “sitting” on this story, and were probably tipped off about the Gay Marriage announcement and thus decided to run it.
That being said I do believe this story because it was corroborated by 4 people not all of whom were Democrats.
But then the question is:
So what? It’s a case of minor bullying even by Gay Kids standards – and yes, gay kids get ALOT, some of it truly horrifying. I was bullied alot in elementary school and a little bit until 10th grade in High School, so I’m against bullying, and people that are bullied get my sympathies. But even so, this is no “smoking gun”. I expected to hear lots of tales of bullying if one is going to establish that someone is a bully, instead MR comes off more as a popular prankster who perhaps once to thrice went a bit too far as kids are wont to do. And its not like he didn’t get teased himself.
So yeah, if I had caught MR doing this back then I probably would have given him a few weeks of detention or a paddling or something and that would have been the end of it. If anyone had thought this should have been made an issue in a Presidential election 40 plus years later I would have laughed at them.
And even though me and the people on here disagree about many things , we agree there are bigger issues to worry about.
The link between earned success and life satisfaction is well established by researchers. The University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, for example, reveals that people who say they feel “very successful” or “completely successful” in their work lives are twice as likely to say they are very happy than people who feel “somewhat successful.” It doesn’t matter if they earn more or less income; the differences persist.
The opposite of earned success is “learned helplessness,” a term coined by Martin Seligman, the eminent psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. It refers to what happens if rewards and punishments are not tied to merit: People simply give up and stop trying to succeed.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304749904577385650652966894.html
So true. Bullies are only the first in a line of decisions whether or not a person will attempt to be their own master or let people or a situation master them. Of course, when there is overwhelming power, how much freedom is there to master the problem? And who has overwhelming power? Our Founding Fathers knew and knew that becoming your own master required limited government. In Romney’s case, his battle was to master becoming a bully. He had the power in High School, and he met that battle and won. He is a measured and moderate man who genuinely embraces and believes in public service not to “speak for those who can’t speak for themselves” but in the more personal sense of denying personal power and gratification for the higher benefit which approaches a spiritual life. What is love other than this? Of course, the motive must be genuine.
If the government does succeed in eliminating the bully wars, the unintended consequences will be loss of freedom, hence identity, to both the would be bullier and the bullied. Human growth requires conflict and in this world, there will always be that. Choosing the moral way, obtaining your soul’s correction, growing from the material to the spiritual, these are the tasks which God has determined shall always be before us. The easy life of material abundance and peace between all men is not going to happen but it is not God’s will. This is why the progressive rages against God and His plan and why liberals are always angry. Deep down they know, they know, they have no chance and deep down, they are committed to hell, that is destruction, rather than acceptance of what they cannot change.
How a brave man responds to a bully:
http://www.wnd.com/2012/05/sheriff-joe-to-obama-no-way/
Oh gee, Mr. Obama said this week, that he supports gay marriages.
Well, big deal! He can SUPPORT anything, all he wants to.
That doesn’t mean that he’ll DO ANYTHING to help gay marriages get more help.
Democrat President, President Kennedy SUPPORTED the idea-that people should end the Vietnam War, but he didn’t make it happen.
Democrat President LB Johnson SUPPORTED the idea-that people should end the Vietnam War, but he didn’t make it happen.
Don’t be surprised if, that if in the next 10 years, Obama [supports] helping people get gay marriages, but doesn’t actually do anything practical to help people get these marriages.
I can support any political plan, but my actually doing anything to help a plan, is another thing altogether.
And that is the same with any other person, as well.
@TR I actually kinda hope he does try to push something through so it can blow up in his face. The heartland is sick of the Leftist disease, and as NC demonstrated, gay marriage doesn’t have nearly the support it would need for Obama to really support it.
@Tesh
Absolutely.
I totally agree with what you have just said.
Cheers,
TR
It’s the same war. Holding the feet of the Islamafascist to the fire, to pushing back against domestic fundies who use Bronze age dogmas of a desert wasteland to determine contemporary social policy, it’s the same war. Obama has consistently evolved towards my position, I saw it in the 08′ campaigns and it’s paying off for individualism and human freedom across the board.
I’m having to watch local stations for my news so far this summer in my mountain home….thus no Fox News on cable.
I was surprised to hear even Diane Sawyer point out that some were questioning the timing of the WaPo article.
Maybe The One *IS* slowly losing MSM’s support.
I’m not absolutely sure what Nyomythus meant by his comment above, but I think I hate it.
…and I think this silliness about gays and gay marriage is gonna solidify Romney’s base every bit as much as it will solidify Obama’s base.
Hopefully, this will help get Republicans to the polls and make them want to work for firing Obama. And hopefully independents will see the desperation of it all.
Hat Tip to Ace for this:
Scariest five words until the election: “Supreme Court Justice Eric Holder”
It might matter if the press could reach the voters who will determine the election. I don’t think they are bothering about WaPo or NYT.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/daily_presidential_tracking_poll
Romney 49
Obama 45
I don’t think it’s because the electorate is in love with Romney.
So far, Walker is holding on in Wisconsin against all the Left can throw at him, and Wisconsin is not a conservative state.
I’ve been away, so I didn’t know Nyomythus is back. He brought back his old drum, too, and I expect we will hear him beat it.
I hope Paul takes enough delegates to FORCE the party to give him a platform at least to speak and maybe wring a concession or two from the Mittster. The Republican party, like the Dems desperately needs some new blood.
And while I hope Mitt wins against Barry in the fall(lesser of two evils, not waging an undeclared war against me b/c I’m white unlike Barry etc), the fact is like most of the past 3 elections, both candidates stink and neither is going to turn this ship around.
Sorry folks.
Paul would fall into the category of “tired old blood.” Geritol, now, that’s the ticket!
As I posted yesterday, this issue will quickly fade from the 24/7 MSM cycle. Its just another effort by Team Obama & the MSM to take voters collective eye off the ball called the economy. 90+% of homosexuals were going to vote for BHO before this “evolution” and that percentage will not change after BHO’s phony “profile in courage”. As George Pal stated above, it is an act of desperation.
There are 2, and only 2 important factors. The first is getting your base to the polls. The second, and most important, is getting ‘independents’ to vote for your candidate. Homosexual marriage is not going to sway ‘independents’ one iota. Its the economy, stupid time. Its the inflation everyone can see at the grocery checkout line. Its the price of gasoline. Its 1+ trillion annual deficits. Its raising the debt ceiling once again before November rolls around. Its unemployment far higher than the BLS mumbo jumbo. There are only a few transexual eskimo lesbians switching their vote from Romney to Obama over this smarmy profile in courage.
Brad says, “… the fact is like most of the past 3 elections, both candidates stink and neither is going to turn this ship around.”
This has been true since 1960. Welcome to the club. 😉
Obama plans to do more than merely offer verbal support for gay marriage. In order for him to do that however he needs another term and at least one new SCOTUS appointment.
Once he has a voting majority on the court, his ‘current’ view that gay marriage is a states rights issue will evaporate. Its certain that in private conversations with gay marriage advocates, he’s pointed out that the only way to make gay marriage permanent is for the SCOTUS to rule that making it illegal is a violation of the equal amendment clause. Just as Roe v. Wade made abortion legal and irrevocable.
Thirty two states have had referendums on gay marriage and the voters of all 32 states have rejected it. The only way that gay marriage can be implemented is for it’s legality to become “the law of the land”.
Yet, gay marriage is a red herring, as gay marriage is a transitional step to the ultimate goal; acceptance of the lifestyle by the public, demonstrated by official public celebrations of its value and charges of hate speech (with felony convictions and jail time) against any who speak out against it. It’s societal acceptance which gays yearn for most.
Missing in much of the discussion of gay marriage is what must legally happen if the SCOTUS rules in favor of gay marriage. Having established an arbitrary line defining who may and may not marry, plural marriage advocates will emerge and claim that the “only two people may marry” definition is arbitrary and therefore unconstitutionally discriminatory.
And, in time, they’ll win because stating that only two people may marry is arbitrary and becomes entirely subjective once the SCOTUS ruling removes the only objective criteria in the entire issue of defining marriage; that only a man and a woman can naturally reproduce.
In a few generations, when the biological connection between parent and child has sufficiently frayed, something that plural and gay marriages are particularly susceptible to, the pressure to have the state take an ever greater role in parenting will gain momentum.
The potential for much is resting on this election; “A Brave New World”, fundamental transformation, indeed…
Curtis,
Re: learned helplessness. Think about Obama’s community organizer past. His job was not to teach and encourage people to solve their own problems. It was to anger those people so they would protest and occupy banks and government buildings to get said institutions to solve their problems for them. Of course, this approach never brings satisfaction to the people he is trying to “help.” It does, however, give you a core of angry incompetent supporters and feeeds your messiah complex.
Geoffrey Britain:
Have you been asleep the past thirty years where nearly half of all marriages have ended in divorce, there’s a 70 plus percent illegitimacy rate in the American Black community and the white one has been steadily rising till where it is now over 20 percent, millions of kids have been placed in foster care, family “law” courts have been turned into Star Chambers, and divorce has been eased to the point that most states don’t even have waiting periods anymore. Have you missed women getting multiple methods of birth control and human sperm and human eggs being produced via stem cells?
Marriage has ALREADY been divorced from reproduction, and its already arguably been divorced from pretty much any kind of “contract law”.
The institution is dying, tending to become something only the upper middle class or rich can afford (check out marriage rates for the poor, working poor, and low middle class) and you are complaining that gay marriage is going to hurt it? What have you been doing to save it?
By the way:
One of the reasons I’m not as rah-rah about the USA as most on here is that you can partly tell how much a countries ruling classes care about their citizens by how they treat families and family formation.
Even more so then our unsustainable economic system (where people are expected to uproot themselves on a dime) our family court system shows just how little fathers and children -and even to an increasing extent mothers- are valued. And they certainly don’t operate under Due Process or any of the other supposed “rights” that we are guaranteed by our Constitution.
But no one cares, unless or until they or someone they know have been devastated by them.
It must be terribly embarrassing for him that Dick Cheney went on record supporting gay marriage first.
This supports my theory that BO’s re-election strategy now is basically to energize his “base” and try to demonize Romney. It may be taking it to an extreme, though – a gay marriage ban passed in CALIFORNIA, at the same time BO was sweeping the state in 2008.
Two gays and Obama walked into a bar. Two of them ducked, one got messed up, why? It was an electorate bar. Too bad, so sad. He must know he is going to lose, just bringing in as much dough on his way out as he can?
I’m in my summer home in the mountains of New Mexico now. New Mexico is sort of a purple state…state wide and national elections swing back and forth between Republicans and Dems. The northern part of the state is very liberal (Santa Fe, Taos, parts of Albuquerque, etc.). The southern parts are conservative, especially the southeastern part where you see as many Texas license plates as NM ones.
I’m watching local (aka MSM) TV stations nowadays and am seeing lots of political ads. The Dems’ strategy boils down to this:
1. The Republicans will end Social Security.
2. The Republicans will end Medicare.
3. The Republicans will continue to give tax breaks to the rich and the oil companies. They even call them the “Bush” tax breaks to tie in the unpopular Bush.
Unfortunately that tactic could be effective because many (most?) voters are dumb and only listen to sound bites.
Somehow, we must get across the concept that doing things that sound noble but that we can’t afford will eventually wind up causing taxes on everyone (probably via a devalued dollar) INCLUDING THE POOR. “The rich” can’t foot the bill for all this even if they are taxed 100%.
It’s gonna be a hard row to hoe to get this into the heads of our electorate, many of whom aren’t the brightest bulbs on the string.
But we have to…the survival of our country depends on it.
Neo:
I’d be very interested in your thoughts on the strong connection between an artistic and creative culture (eg, Santa Fe, Taos, Austin, the film industry) and liberalism.
Hasn’t modern progressivism reached the point that any objection to the decline and ultimate destruction of a functioning and civilized society is in fact discriminatory?
All us rubes just don’t know how sophisticated abject poverty and anarchy actually are.
Brad,
What have I been doing? Honoring it in word and deed.
An ideal is not abandoned simply because many find it difficult to honor. The Western ideal of traditional heterosexual marriage became an ideal because when achieved, it’s the optimum arrangement for both child raising and monogamous relationship.
No, I haven’t been asleep, but clearly I’ve reached different conclusions than you. Half of all marriages DON’T end in divorce. Neither the black nor the white illegitimacy rate have anything to do with the institution of marriage’s viability.
The court’s treatment of divorce is irrelevant to this issue as well. In fact, all the factors you cite are irrelevant, which is not to indicate that they are unimportant.
The left is trying to divorce marriage from reproduction but reports of its death are greatly exaggerated.
However, regardless of traditional marriage’s health, it’s value to society as the only “line of demarcation” with supportive objective criteria remains.
When society considers the question of who may marry and who may not, other than the “the age of consent” factor, biological reproduction being limited to only a man and a woman is the sole objective criteria. Drawing marriage’s ‘line’ anywhere else is, ultimately, legally indefensible due to its completely arbitrary nature.
Geoffrey Britain:
Marriage in any form you can imagine (esp when you dare to invoke reproductive potential as your argument for it) depends on systematic incentives as any kind of “permanent” pairing goes against the grain of our evolutionary biology.
In short, you have to incentivize people into marriage, esp men.
But since you poo-poo such an insight and dismiss the issue of the ease and cost of divorce, you really have no argument against gay marriage. We, after all, do not bar couples who don’t wish to or can’t have kids from marrying, and your “age of consent” thing varies among time and place anyway.
Basically, you’ve just made a libertarian case contractual marriages. And while contractual marriages would offer some stability, there’s no pressing public policy need to limit such things to heterosexuals. Indeed, you haven’t even tried to make one.
I suspect your issues are religiously based, and thus I don’t expect a rational argument from you any how. I do expect better from a “defender” of marriage, however, and I certainly don’t consider you one.
Brad’s thinking is coarse and stupid, in a word, arrogant. It runs around like a wild child without a parent to restrain it. Hope for the child is nil; there will only be countless and useless battles. The child will never mature into an adult but will continue as a scoffer and fool, for which, functional society presents two chocies: alienation or beatings.
Curtis:
I was going to pat you on the head like a good child, but I read farther and determined that you’ve probably been bullying some of your little friends.
In the corner with you, until you learn how to logically and factually argue.
Brad,
I’ll try to contain my disappointment that in your opinion I’m an inadequate defender of marriage. Your response however, makes clear that you’ve failed to understand my point. Perhaps you became sidetracked with your erroneous assumption that my ‘objection’ to same sex marriage is religiously based, which it is not. Perhaps if you reread my comments with a more attentive eye you’ll grasp the concept.