Corkey:
Okay, if you don't care what they think then how do you get them to actually fold us into the circle of people called 'citizen'. I'm not a Canadian citizen and neither is my wife so we can't get married in Canada. The US government isn't obliged to acknowledge a marriage done in Canada.
I'm not talking about begging, Corkey. I'm talking about being pragmatic because, at the end of the day, we have to live in the same country as the people who hate us. They are not going away. We can't make them go away and they overwhelm us in sheer numbers. So we have to convince the vast middle, those people who are not actively anti-gay, that we have the better case. That is NOT begging.
We do not have the numbers to simply win by decree. We cannot *make* the majority do *anything* they don't want to do. Yes, in an ideal world, we would just say this WILL BE and it would become so. We don't live there. We can't even maneuver an absolute dictator into power on our behalf. So we have to win through process. We have to get enough people who are not gay on our side that the social pressure to change the law will be too much to ignore. We are not going to do that by grabbing them by the collar and screaming "I don't give a damn about you or what you think, now you WILL make marriage legal between same-sex couples!" Straight people do not HAVE to change the law. The law, as stands, works well-enough for their needs. It benefits straight people very little to expand the definition of marriage. If it were important enough to straight people for same-sex couples to get married the law would already be that way. So we have to convince a majority, that feels no widespread pain over our lack of rights, to somehow see our cause as a matter of justice. We have to win them over.
That is not begging, Corkey, that is the political process. What other choice do we have other than the political process? We can't break away. We can't all just leave. We shouldn't *have* to leave. We can't get our way by sheer number of our votes alone. We do not have the numbers to take over the government by either democratic or non-democratic means. I also do not think we should succumb to the temptation to use non-democratic means--meaning, we can't just outlaw homophobia. We must not do that. We must never outlaw *ideas*. So given all of that, what other choice do we have but to go to the majority, present our case, show how the opposition is the same crowd it has *always* been, and that just as the cause of my parent's generation was righteous so is our cause righteous?
Living in an open, democratic society means learning to get one's way by convincing 50% + 1 of your fellow citizens to side with you to change the laws. It means convincing the media that your cause is worthy of covering you. It is convincing lawmakers to champion your cause, even if they are not one of you. It is convincing the clergy to side with you and to use their pulpit's as a place to rally people to your cause. Politics is the art of compromise in order to achieve the possible. Despite what the Republicans in Congress *believe* about negotiation, it does not involve the other side capitulating abjectly. That means we have to understand what the costs of change are. None of that is negotiating anything away or begging for anything. It is trying to figure out how to achieve a just goal through the processes of our country.
Cheers
Aj
Quote:
Originally Posted by Corkey
Actually we were married legally in Canada. I don't care one way or the other, if it doesn't make any since to you, that isn't my goal. I'm not going to live my life in fear or in what ifs', that is a total waste of energy. Go convince the Idiot party that you want your rights, they don't care about you, they don't care about me, the only thing they care about is their racist, sexist, classist small minded grasp of their own small patch of Americana.
Trust me I've been fighting this war longer than you've been alive.
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