Tag Archives: anti-LGBTQ sentiments

Today’s Culture of Hate

Posted on by under education, Global Issues, History, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

I grew up in the 1950s, the Jim Crow era, where I saw bigotry and hatred first-hand on a daily basis.  Then came the 1960s, the time of ‘Peace and love’, the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King and others who showed us the way out of the culture of hatred.  I thought we could only get better from there on.  I was wrong.  Never in my 72 years have I seen as much unwarranted, unprovoked hatred as we see today, both here in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world.  It is … depressing, to say the least.  Robert Reich is a better person than I am, or perhaps just better able to put his thoughts into words than I am, but what he has to say about the current culture of hate reflects my own feelings, though admittedly he is calmer about it all than I tend to be!

The corrosiveness of hate

The challenge ahead

By Robert Reich

16 October 2023

I’m trying not to despair, but the world seems awash in hate right now. In the Middle East. In Ukraine and Russia. In rabid anti-immigrant movements in Europe. Among some Trump followers, including Trump Republicans in Congress.

Threats are mounting against Muslim Americans and Jewish Americans. On Saturday, outside of Chicago, a 6-year-old boy was stabbed to death in an anti-Muslim hate crime. Threats of domestic terrorism are mounting.

Yesterday I saw a demonstration by students at a university that prides itself on free speech and inclusion, but the rally reeked of hatefulness and intolerance.

Tragically, hate is a huge motivator. “The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who,” wrote Kevin Phillips, the political analyst who died last week.

I did not know Phillips well. We appeared together on various panels and forums over the years, so I heard a lot of his views about political strategy. I’m reluctant to speak ill of someone recently deceased, but it is important to understand Phillips’s legacy.

His 1969 book, “The Emerging Republican Majority,” was for many decades the GOP’s blueprint for how to win over white voters unhappy with the Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights in the 1960s.

Phillips urged Republicans to link white voters’ racial anxieties to issues such as crime, federal spending, and voting rights, and make racially coded appeals such as “law and order.”

It worked — helping to produce Richard M. Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972, Reagan’s in 1980 (aided by Reagan’s condemnation of “welfare queens”), George W. Bush’s 1986 victory (remember “Willie Horton”?), and GOP majorities for decades.

Phillips’s politics of hate was the predicate for Trump’s politics of resentment and fear — Trump’s dehumanizing of immigrants and Muslims, use of antisemitic tropes, denigrating “globalists,” “coastal elites,” and the “deep state” bureaucrats, and attacking the mainstream media as “enemies of the people” and Democrats as “socialists.”

The politics of hate is central to today’s fierce divide between red and blue states — including Ron DeSantis’s and Greg Abbott’s wars on trans youth, “critical race theory,” women wanting to preserve autonomy over their own bodies, and undocumented immigrants.  

And it’s at the heart of the “great replacement theory” peddled by Tucker Carlson and other bottom-feeders in the right-wing media.

Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes built Fox News on fear and hate. Social media is now overflowing with it.

I have spent much of my adult life condemning haters (I repeatedly took on Phillips). But I do not hate them.

Hate is a corrosive. It consumes and devours those who practice it.

History shows that where hate is normalized, its poison seeps into the subsoil of a culture. It gruesomely distorts societies.

Brutality, fear, and distrust transform otherwise rational human beings into close-minded fanatics. People no longer listen to the “other side.” They view them as threats, enemies.

When hatred becomes entrenched, it can last generations. Haters pass their hatred and bigotry on to their children.

Yet today, too many politicians, both here and abroad, are fueling hatred for their own selfish purposes.

Real leaders stand up against hate. They reject bigotry. They denounce intolerance. They seek to bring people together rather than spur revenge and retribution.  

I’m often reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s words in his Second Inaugural Address, on March 4, 1865 — when the end of the deadly Civil War was in sight, when South and North were brimming with hate of each other, and when many on the Union side were eager to punish the rebels. But Lincoln understood his task:

“With malice toward none with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Of course Hamas militants must be held responsible. So must Putin. So must Trump. So must those who are now threatening Muslim Americans and Jewish Americans, as must everyone who is blinded by hate.

In holding them responsible, though, we must make every effort not to fuel even more hate.

Parents’ Rights??? Which Ones?

Posted on by under education, History, Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

Parental rights … sounds good, yes?  But … what it really boils down to in todays vernacular is the right of a few parents, or sometimes just one parent, to deprive all other children of the education they need in order to succeed in their lives.  Jamelle Bouie’s column from a few days ago is spot-on and paints a picture of an education system that is even further devolved that what we’ve had for the past twenty years or so.  HOW do we expect our future leaders to do a better job than the ones in the past, when we won’t even teach them about our history, won’t give them a chance to understand people who may not be just like themselves???

What the Republican Push for ‘Parents’ Rights’ Is Really About

By Jamelle Bouie

28 March 2023

You may have heard the phrase “parents’ rights.”

It sounds unobjectionable — of course parents should have rights — which is probably why it’s become the term of choice for the conservative effort to ban books, censor school curriculums and suppress politically undesirable forms of knowledge.

When House Republicans introduced a bill that would require public schools to notify parents that they are entitled to see course material and lists of books kept in school libraries, they cited “parents’ rights” as the reason.

“That’s what today is all about: It’s about every parent, mom and dad, but most importantly about the students in America,” Speaker Kevin McCarthy said. Several Republican-controlled states have either proposed or passed similar measures.

The official name of Florida’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay” law, prohibiting “classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity,” is the Parental Rights in Education Act. And the state’s Stop WOKE (short for Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees) Act, which outlaws any school instruction that classifies individuals as “inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,” was framed, similarly, as a victory for the rights of parents.

“By signing this legislation, which is the first in the nation to end corporate wokeness and critical race theory in our schools, we are prioritizing education, not indoctrination,” Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez said in a statement. “We will always fight to protect our children and parents from this Marxist-inspired curriculum.”

It should be said that this movement for “parents’ rights” in Florida has empowered certain parents to remove books, films, even whole classes that threaten to expose their children to material that might make them uncomfortable. In Pinellas County, for example, a single complaint about the Disney film “Ruby Bridges” — about the 6-year-old girl who integrated an all-white New Orleans school in 1960 — led to its removal from an elementary school.

In his successful 2021 campaign for the Virginia governor’s mansion, Glenn Youngkin made “parents matter” his slogan, and he has asserted “parents’ rights” in his effort to regulate the treatment of transgender children and end “divisive concepts” such as “critical race theory” in schools. His early moves included new history standards that removed discussions of racism and downplayed the role of slavery in causing the Civil War.

And at this moment, Texas Republicans are debating a bill — backed by Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick — that, according to The Texas Tribune, “would severely restrict classroom lessons, school activities and teacher guidance about sexual orientation and gender identity in all public and charter schools up to 12th grade.” Texas parents, The Tribune notes, already have the right to “remove their child temporarily from a class or activity that conflicts with their beliefs or review all instructional materials.” This bill would further empower parents to object to books, lessons and entire curriculums.

“Parents’ rights,” you will have noticed, never seems to involve parents who want schools to be more open and accommodating toward gender-nonconforming students. It’s never invoked for parents who want their students to learn more about race, identity and the darker parts of American history. And we never hear about the rights of parents who want schools to offer a wide library of books and materials to their children.

“Parents’ rights,” like “states’ rights,” is quite particular. It’s not about all parents and all children and all the rights they might have. [Emphasis added]

The reality of the “parents’ rights” movement is that it is meant to empower a conservative and reactionary minority of parents to dictate education and curriculums to the rest of the community. It is, in essence, an institutionalization of the heckler’s veto, in which a single parent — or any individual, really — can remove hundreds of books or shut down lessons on the basis of that one person’s political discomfort. “Parents’ rights,” in other words, is when some parents have the right to dominate all the others.

And, of course, the point of this movement — the point of creating this state-sanctioned heckler’s veto — is to undermine public education through a thousand little cuts, each meant to weaken public support for teachers and public schools, and to open the floodgates to policies that siphon funds and resources from public institutions and pump them into private ones. The Texas bill I mentioned, for instance, would give taxpayer dollars to parents who choose to opt out of public schools for private schools or even home-schooling.

The culture war that conservatives are currently waging over education is, like the culture wars in other areas of American society, a cover for a more material and ideological agenda. The screaming over “wokeness” and “D.E.I.” is just another Trojan horse for a relentless effort to dismantle a pillar of American democracy that, for all of its flaws, is still one of the country’s most powerful engines for economic and social mobility.

Ultimately, then, the “parents’ rights” movement is not about parents at all; it’s about whether this country will continue to strive for a more equitable and democratic system of education, or whether we’ll let a reactionary minority drag us as far from that goal as possible, in favor of something even more unequal and hierarchical than what we already have.

And Yet Again …

Posted on by under education, guns, History, Law and justice, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

I have not yet written about the horrific massacre in Colorado that left 5 people dead and 25 injured, not because I had nothing to say, but rather because I have too much to say.  Meanwhile, Dan Rather and Elliott Kirschner have said it for me, and in a much better way than I could have, for mine would have been a rant.  I will, no doubt, have more of my own words on this subject sometime soon, once I can stop 🤬.

Guns and Hatred

Once more

Dan Rather and Elliott Kirschner

22 November 2022

Guns and hatred collide once more.

Peace is broken; lives are shattered.

Again we see the pictures and learn the names of those who have been slaughtered.

“Authorities are trying to determine a motive.” But the broader narrative is already known.

Those who feed the hate, stoke the vitriol, and profit off of our divisions hide behind meaningless expressions of thoughts and prayers. For them, there is no pause for reflection, no sense that we can do better.

Anger, waves of anger, sweep over a deep trench of hopelessness.

We have mourned before, and we surely will again.

A cycle repeats. The words we uttered for the last tragedy could be reprised for this one, and likely the one to come.

In what sane world do we accept a national impotence in the face of unending bloodshed? None.

Why do we demonize people for how they express their love for others? Or for what they look like? Or for how they pray?

Why is celebrating our common humanity not enough?

What do we tell our children? How do we teach them?

Hate is learned, and it is being taught.

If we are honest with our history, we know that hatred has been a constant in our national story. But so too have attempts to rise above it, to make progress toward a more just and equitable nation, to strive for that “more perfect union.”

We celebrate acts of heroism. We find support in our collective grief. But we should never accept this murderous hostility to our diversity. Our national strength is rooted in our differences. We are all at our best when we support each other.

Far too many continue to live in fear because of who they are. This fear is not an accident or unintentional. There are powerful people in this country who base their power on the ability to frighten.

Cultivated terror is a poison that infects our society. Once unleashed, it is impossible to control. It easily explodes in violence, as it did in Colorado Springs. There will be another set of charges to mark, another court case to cover, another verdict to await. But we can already pass a verdict on a society that allows this to continue.

Completely eliminating cultivated hate and violence is not possible, but we can drastically reduce it — if only enough Americans unite to make it happen.

Club Q

Posted on by under guns, Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Re-blogs, Social commentary

Short, sweet, and to the point … words of wisdom from across the pond.

Coalition of the Brave

Six years ago, Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, came under attack by a gun-toting lunatic, who killed 49 people at the LGBT venue. On Saturday, Club Q in Colorado Springs, came under attack from a maniac, and five people are confirmed to have lost their lives, thanks to a combination of the strange attitude towards guns in the US, and prejudice against the LGBT community.

The situation is still evolving, but it seems likely this attack was motivated by homophobia. It was made possible by easy access to deadly weapons, and a culture that worships guns. We hear the usual arguments, namely that guns are necessary to oppose tyranny, but how many lives have been sacrificed in the name of that particular philosophy, versus how many tyrants removed from power in the US? When does the culture of gun love change?

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Foot-Stomping MAD!

Posted on by under Free Press Issues, guns, Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Rants, Social commentary

It’s been over a year-and-a-half since thousands joined forces to attack the U.S. Capitol in a failed, but nonetheless bloody coup attempt.  The violence on that day, the calls to ‘hang Mike Pence’, still makes me sick to my stomach.  The fact that the attempted coup was approved of by the ‘man’ who called himself ‘president’ still gives me nightmares.  Violence seems to follow Donald Trump wherever he goes, and he seems to incite a great deal of it.  Since that fateful January 6th, violence and calls for violence have increased … even more so in response to a search warrant that was executed to retrieve national security documents Trump illegally stole from us and possibly shared.

Threats of political violence and actual attacks have become a steady reality of American life such that some days I feel we’re living in Somalia instead of the United States.  And the violence isn’t all political … there have been 27 school shootings so far in the first 7 ½ months of 2022!  School children!!!  Yes, 27!  No, you haven’t heard about all of them, for the media only makes a big deal if a relatively large number of children are killed such as was the case in Uvalde, Texas in May, but in total, 83 people, mostly children, have been shot in those 27 school shootings this year.  Can’t blame these directly on politics, but you can sure as hell can blame the politicians who have consistently blocked any form of gun legislation such as banning assault weapons or far more stringent background checks.  So, their answer is to arm all teachers … put even more guns into the hands of people unqualified to have them!

The political violence, however, is out of control and the feeding frenzy isn’t helped by social media, certain mainstream media outlets, and the politicians who keep telling people that the ‘other’ party is the one responsible for all of our woes.

A man named Garrett Ziegler, a former aide to Donald Trump, posted the names and personal information of the FBI Agents who assisted in the execution of the search warrant to retrieve classified documents from the home of Donald Trump.  He even included the social media account of one of the agent’s children!  Within minutes, the families of these agents began receiving death threats.  DEATH THREATS … against the families of law enforcement agents who were merely doing their jobs!

After the brutal murder of George Floyd in 2020, there were numerous Black Lives Matter protest that were, for the most part, peaceful.  What little violence there was, was property damage, not lives threatened.  But people were up in arms because the protests existed.  Yet some of the same people who hated on Black Lives Matter protestors are the very ones cheering those who are threatening civil war, threatening to execute Merrick Garland!  So … apparently they aren’t against violence at all, but are just against Black people, against LGBTQ people, and against anyone who attempts to hold the ‘man’ they have put on a pedestal accountable for his actions.  And speaking of the LGBTQ community …

In late June, a former Marine stepped down as the grand marshal of a July 4th parade in Houston after a deluge of threats that focused on her support of transgender rights. A few weeks later, the gay mayor of an Oklahoma city quit his job after what he described as a series of “threats and attacks bordering on violence.”  A five-year-old girl was evicted from her kindergarten because her parents are gay.  As I reported a week or so ago, a town in Michigan will shut down its library because the library refuses to ban books by LGBTQ authors or about LGBTQ people or issues!

The judge who signed the warrant to search Trump’s home for the missing classified documents is now receiving death threats, as is his family after some on social media called for a “rope around his neck”.  Then Fox “News” exacerbated the situation by posting a photoshopped fake picture of the judge sprawled out with Ghislaine Maxwell giving him a foot massage.  These are the kinds of things that stir the masses and get people KILLED!!!

Political violence, racial violence, school shootings … what the Sam Hell has this nation turned into???  What are we humans turning into???  Have we sold our humanity downriver, traded it for bigotry, hatred and violence???

I don’t have any answers, my friends.  We can … we must … each do our part by controlling our own tempers, by shutting down any conversations where someone is speaking of or calling for a violent act, but that isn’t going to be enough to solve the problem.  We can report those we see on social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook, but that still won’t solve the problem.  I think the answer lies in a direction none of us particularly want to go, but that perhaps we must go, and that is to put some limitations on the 1st Amendment right to free speech.  I don’t like it anymore than you do, but as I’ve long said, every right comes with an accompanying responsibility, and the people of this nation have abused the right without accepting the responsibility.  It is highly irresponsible, criminal even, to call for violence, to call for someone’s ‘execution’ just because you don’t like what he says or does.  We absolutely MUST start holding social media outlets and mainstream news accountable to a higher standard than they currently observe.

And … I’m sure you’re tired of hearing me say this, but we must have some gun control laws that do something more than pay lip service!!!  Ban assault weapons altogether!  Deny a gun to anybody who has even a single incidence of violent behaviour.  Raise the gun ownership age to 25!  Yes, 25!  And make gun ownership a “one strike, you’re out” thing.  We have to do this!!!  And we must make the punishment for any violent act so harsh that it actually serves as a deterrent!  Every person who was in the Capitol on January 6th without authorization should automatically be serving a 5-year prison sentence.  Those who had weapons or harmed anyone should be in prison for 20 years, no exceptions.  If the price of violence is high enough, people will think before they mouth off or worse yet, grab their guns and go on a shooting spree!

I’ve said it enough times, but I’ll keep on saying it … VIOLENCE IS NEVER THE ANSWER!!!  We are truly, and this is not hyperbole, turning into a third-world nation where random shootings are becoming the norm, where even children are targets, and where nobody is quite safe anywhere anymore.  Write to your Senators and Representatives and tell them that THEY have the power to make changes and they damn well better do it NOW!!!  I really don’t know what more we can do, but we better start doing something.