So we've apparently entered silly season; the habitual fight to exhaustion in dueling diaries over who will best represent Democrats in the coming race for the White House and why that choice should be so, must be so, cannot possibly be otherwise.
There are a few weaknesses inherent in that approach. Just to begin with, if a Democrat wins that election, any Democrat really, given that we are Democrats too, we all win. Practically a tautology, one would think, considering that Democrats are by and large very homogenous in their policy views. It's their personalities that differ, and what they symbolize.
Ideological polarization, U.S. Congress
I'd imagine this to be a statement with all the charm of the blindingly fucking obvious on a partisan site; but then again, I like to hit myself in the face with a hammer for enjoyment, this for the simple reason that I'm not very bright. So it's well within the realm of the possible that I don't understand arguments more sophisticated than mine. Res Ipsa Loquitur and all that, now hand me the hammer.
Or perhaps not.
I'm a Democrat. I lived half my life overseas, at a remove from our national conversation. As a result, I haven't always voted, or voted a straight ticket; doing so seemed to me at the time to be somewhat unfair, making a choice in a contest that did not measurably impact my circumstances while absent the means to make the choice an informed one.
Not to mention that American elections to a young gay man in Europe seemed little better than an exercise between two competing degrees of discrimination. I cast my first ballot for Bill Clinton with bile still fresh in my throat over his signature on DOMA and DADT, the first consigning me and mine, seemingly forever, to the shadows of American life, the second costing several friends and one lover their very livelihood in the nation's armed forces for no crime other than love.
Our shining city on a hill had no room for me, child of privilege or not. We Americans built a nation out of gleaming words, words whose lustre served only to mask how empty they could be and too often still are, to hide the simple observation that great light inevitably casts deep shadows. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, a bright shining lie told to obscure the bitter betrayal waiting patiently in the dark.
These shadows darkened countless lives, in too many cases still do, are for too many a long night with no promise of dawn. Not just for gays like yours truly, but for women, people of color, the poor, disabled, migrants from every corner of this earth yearning to breathe free; many have no seat at our vaunted table of brotherhood. But ever we live in hope – hope that is our birthright as Americans, to live our lives freely, to do and let be as we choose.
This hope is on the ballot next November, hope that some Americans, in the other party mainly but not all, would see extinguished.
What does hope look like? Something like this:
We must conclude that Amendment 2 classifies homosexuals not to further a proper legislative end but to make them unequal to everyone else. This Colorado cannot do. A State cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws. Amendment 2 violates the Equal Protection Clause, and the judgment of the Supreme Court of Colorado is affirmed.
It is so ordered.
These are the concluding lines of
Romer v. Evans, handed down by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1996. Romer was the first high court decision to recognize the scantest of basic protection for an entire class of Americans, to not be the target of intentionally discriminatory laws born out of animus. To have a small share in a promise made to all of us, that
all men are created equal.
This is what the Supreme Court can do. Or to draw the point more broadly, an illustration of what it means when the Federal government is in your corner.
Perhaps you think this example is a trivial matter of little weight, at best one confined to the bedroom; I've seen remarks to that effect. That inevitably means only one thing, far smaller than you think: that you've never had the measureless power of the United States government intrude into your bedroom, that you lack the basic empathy to understand what this means for someone not yourself. Most likely, you've also never had to live your life as a lie solely to evade that power, effective as it is far beyond any bedroom; that's what a stranger to its laws means.
There are many strangers to the law in our shining city on a hill.
Romer gave me hope I would find justice in my country, our country, in a few stark words that eventually paved my path home. Not because America was or is perfect, nothing made by human hands ever will be, but because it can be made better. I've seen it made better. We have, uniquely among the nations of the earth, an American Dream; I believe that's worth fighting for. I know it's concerned not just with the size of our paychecks but with the scope of our dreams. Dr. Martin Luther King was slain precisely because he believed in this variegated dream of opportunity and equality.
I don't buy the poisonous lie that we need to choose between the two. And I reject the equally poisonous fruit of that lie, that there is no noticeable distinction between voting D and voting R. Tell that lie to a hungry child, if indeed at long last you have left no sense of decency. I can't and I won't.
Fairness, justice and freedom are more than words, they are perspectives.
This election matters; the truth is that they all do. The country will face a very stark choice: between a Democrat (at this writing, presumably Hillary Clinton, but the day is young) and a Republican, possibly the snarling human obscenity that is Ted Cruz, or someone in his mold. And make no mistake: they are all cast in his mold. Hic sunt leones.
We can pretend that there is no difference between these two likely choices. Or that there is a real Democrat out there, one who will emasculate Wall Street and gift the nation the equivalent of what the Germans call Soziale Marktwirtschaft; after all, we're electing a king. Pretend even that we can hand the GOP the White House, let the country burn in the vain delusion that we will rule over the ashes.
I may or may not hit myself in the face with a hammer, I'll leave the truth of that to sharper minds than mine, but I will not let my country burn. Perfect or not, exceptional or not, it is mine, ours, our dream to make real. Ted Kennedy said it better than I ever could:
The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.
That's what 2016 is about. A Democrat in the White House. The rest is noise.