'A more perfect union'? When, Mr. President?

By Emily Theroux

My best friend, Jim, is a Georgia native who escaped the backwaters of the Deep South after growing up there, just as I did. Since 1996, when I wandered one summer afternoon into his onetime Middletown interior design business, Jim and I have shared a multitude of interests. 

We've walked miles together to stay in shape, collaborated on making pillows and curtains for clients, ranted about the sorry state of American politics, watched Rachel Maddow eviscerate conservatives, traded good books, fed each other's pets, had occasional spats over imaginary slights, laughed until we almost fell out of our chairs, and gossiped about everything from obnoxious acquaintances to attractive men. Jim taught me how to make quilts, and I helped him figure out how to navigate Facebook. We spend a solid hour or more on Skype every few days, planted in front of our computer screens only blocks apart.

Both of us are married – me for 15 years; Jim, technically, for three-quarters of one. My spouse is a man, and so is his. Last fall, after same-sex marriage became legal in New York, Jim was finally able to wed Gary, his longtime partner, on the 35th anniversary of the day they met.

Jim is a singular individual, not a demographic statistic or a societal scapegoat to be trotted out any time a televangelist needs a reason why God hates hurricane victims, or an office-seeker wants to scare "values voters" for political gain. Jim did not "choose" to be gay (as the ignorant and the powerful alike insist), and his identity encompasses a great deal more than his sexual orientation. In a blog Jim recently began writing, he succinctly expressed his reaction to being objectified by politicians who revile him and religious proselytizers who think they can change him:

"To put it simply, I am tired of 'sitting in the back of the bus.' I am tired of being labeled. I am tired of being discriminated against. I am tired of religious nutbags calling me 'evil' and 'degenerate' and blaming me for natural disasters. I am tired of political candidates using me by declaring that I am 'morally depraved' and responsible for destroying the 'sacred family unit,' while, at the same time, these politicians hide behind Jesus (I was taught that Jesus was all about love, not hate) to justify their relentless prejudices and religious intolerance. To everyone who thinks they're normal and I'm not: How the hell does my being married have any effect on your life?"

Both parties 'categorize' voters, but for different reasons

My friend sees himself as a person who happens to have diverse connections to all kinds of other people, not strictly as a "gay man" – a distinction that evades those who marginalize other people by assigning them to groups identified by a common race, ethnicity, creed, gender, or sexual orientation. The resulting "demographics" have been used by members of both major political parties to make electoral calculations.

Democrats tend to focus on "minority" social groups in order to help them succeed in a society steeped in exclusion of the powerless. While their motivations to help the less fortunate may indeed be genuine, Democratic politicians still hope to win the votes of members of the demographic groups they are assisting without losing those of "independents," whom they cannot so readily categorize. 

Republicans often isolate targeted social groups in order to demonize them and thereby divide potential voters into "us" (primarily wealthy white businessmen and their families, along with "low-information" voters who hope to emulate the success of their wealthy role models) versus "them" (Democrats, a.k.a. "socialists"; racial and ethnic minorities, a.k.a. "freeloaders" and "illegal aliens"; feminist women, a.k.a, "fornicators"; gays and lesbians, a.k.a, "deviants" and "Sodomites"; and non-Christians, a.k.a "evil foreigners trying to destroy our way of life").

A North Carolina amendment making same-sex marriage unconstitutional passed all too easily because it employed such stereotypes, in order to appeal to the ignorance and bigotry of the majority. Few who voted in favor of it knew that the amendment would also invalidate domestic unions between unmarried opposite-sex couples and dissolve domestic-violence protections. The Rev. William Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP, said advocates of the law were asking the wrong question for a democracy – as often happens when civil-rights issues are submitted to the popular vote of a poorly informed electorate that has already been brainwashed against the targeted group. "The question shouldn't be, 'How do you feel about same-sex marriage?' but do you let the majority rule against the rights of the minority?"

The Democrats, although they don't share the ruthless Republican agenda of targeting gays and lesbians to polarize the electorate, are not entirely blameless when it comes to politicizing them. In 1996, while running for the Illinois state senate, Barack Obama indicated on a survey that he favored legalizing gay marriage, but by the time he ran for the U.S. Senate against black conservative Alan Keyes in 2004, he began to voice "religious reservations" (criticized by a shrewd Chicago reporter as "a political maneuver"). 

Polls of churchgoing black voters typically reveal a general cultural disapproval of gay "sinfulness" – and Obama needed the vast majority of the black vote to win his Senate seat. When he announced his presidential bid in 2007, Obama said he opposed same-sex marriage but approved of civil unions. By 2011, a spokesman said Obama believed the issue was "best addressed by the states" (a loaded historical reference that angered even Obama's gay campaign donors), while adding that committed same-sex couples should receive "equal protection under the law."

President Obama's views 'evolving' at a snail's pace

Critics have lambasted Obama for his apparent pretense of undergoing a gradual process of reevaluating his position on same-sex marriage. While advancing the causes of gay civil rights immeasurably on many fronts during the past three years, President Obama continues to claim, with increasingly less credibility, that his position on same-sex marriage is "evolving." Now that the North Carolina constitutional ban on same-sex marriage has been passed, the pressure has become overwhelming for Obama to "come out of the closet," as Ruth Marcus wrote in The Washington Post, and make his position on marriage equality clear.

The parade of Obama administration officials who have recently emerged to publicly support marriage equality makes the president's hesitation to follow suit look like a cynical election-year ploy. While the fear of alienating black voters may appear well-founded to a man living in a virtual bubble, even a conservative blogger said that the economy is so bad that open support for same-sex marriage won't cost Obama many black votes. 

But will continuing to advance the notion that he's too "socially conservative" to support marriage equality really help Obama win the votes of straight, white, working-class males in swing states – or does he run the risk of repelling independents and even Democrats by pandering to prejudice, the lowest common denominator of American religious faith? The head of the Democratic Party may ironically be the last Democrat to proclaim his views on an issue that affects real people's lives, long after the general public has left his recalcitrance in the dust.

Gay activists are not necessarily willing to continue practicing infinite patience and providing political cover for the president's rear flank while he awaits the most opportune political moment to announce his next evolutionary phase. Some potential benefactors invited to an upcoming LGBT fundraiser are reportedly withholding campaign donations because of the president's tentative attitude, which they take personally as something akin to a racial affront.

Max Mutchnick, who co-created gay-friendly hit TV show "Will and Grace" and was thrilled when Vice-President Joe Biden praised the sitcom during a recent Meet the Press interview, told the entertainment magazine Variety's managing editor, Ted Johnson, that the president “needs to catch up with his vice-president in terms of his views. ... The reason I feel most offended by this is because I don’t believe the president believes this,” said Mutchnick. “I don’t believe he is evolving. I believe he is a man seeking reelection, and he all but breaks it down into Morse code.”

While Obama attempts to garner gay support in Hollywood without alienating blue-collar voters in flyover country, he may be forced to abandon his apparent plan to postpone dealing with marriage equality until after the election. "While it might take time ... we are going to build a more perfect union," the president said in 2011, several months after New York's state legislature stepped up to the plate and passed the proudly bipartisan law that enabled my friend Jim to legally marry his fiance of 35 years.

Shouldn't the very concept of "a more perfect union" exclude anything "exclusionary" – such as outlawing marriage between two people like Jim and Gary, who had already loved each other for half a lifetime before they were finally given an almost-equal chance at "the pursuit of happiness"?

Racism rears its ugly head in age of Obama

It’s not my imagination, and it’s neither stereotyping nor paranoia. I even have a fistful of academic studies by credible sociologists to back up my theory about race relations in the 21st century: The election of our first African-American president has reawakened the ugly specter of a kind of flagrant racial prejudice that, once it was subdued by “political correctness,” lay dormant for decades in the body politic. That’s why it feels like we’re suddenly being assaulted by bigotry in the age of Obama; the racket it makes is so deafening, after years of relative multicultural harmony.

Now Robert Draper, the author of a new book about House Republican machinations after Barack Obama took office, has supplied anecdotal evidence that supports the sociologists’ conclusions. What Draper said also bolsters my sickening suspicion that the virulent opposition to Obama among a certain swath of the electorate — a vibe that’s so palpable, you practically trip over it every time you go online — is rooted in something far more pernicious than the customary Republican aversion to Democratic policies. (Even though World Net Daily did call Bill Clinton “much more than a ‘stealth’ communist president, but a secret ‘master of the Illuminati’,” this Obama-focused slime is far more abhorrent).

During an interview with Al Sharpton, Draper was asked what he thought motivated “the intense, unparalleled resentment” of Obama from the right. “I think there is a dimension, an extra depth of contempt for this president that is really off the charts,” Draper replied. “I interviewed a lot of Tea Party freshmen, spent a lot of time with them, and I didn’t detect any kind of racial animus in any of them. However, they were ushered in by a Tea Party movement that does have a certain racial component to the depth of contempt that they feel for this president.”

Draper’s book, Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives, has exposed a secret cabal of 15 Republican “strategic thinkers” who met on the very night of Obama’s 2009 inauguration and plotted how they were going to bring him down. Neither John Boehner, who would become Speaker of the House two years later, nor Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, was invited to attend. Boehner, however, apparently failed to notice that the cheers on the day he became speaker were for the 87 Tea Party freshmen whose midterm victories had won him his oversized gavel. McConnell crowed triumphantly that his top political priority for the next two years would be “to deny Barack Obama a second term.”

‘A village in Kenya is missing its idiot! Deport Obama!’
Why, I’ve often wondered, was the gloating so extreme after the 2010 midterm elections? Obviously, the Tea Party hysteria that erupted during the summer of 2009, after Obama introduced his historic health care bill, had gotten the ball rolling. Republican politicians were riling up the fractious crowds with irresponsible drivel about “death panels” and imaginary government bureaucrats “coming between you and your doctor.”

But amid the cacophony of town hall jeers and phony “Astroturf” protests organized by corporate lobbyists, something more sinister was afoot than simply opposing what the vociferous base called “the government takeover” of health care. There was a wild, insolent edge to the proceedings, the kind of raucous mob mentality that you might have observed at a public hanging during the Middle Ages.

Demonstrators at Tea Party rallies carried a wide variety of signs and banners. Many displayed patriotic or anti-tax slogans, but others bore overtly racist messages — some of them crude (and often misspelled) racial epithets and taunts (“A village in Kenya is missing its idiot! Deport Obama!”; “We don’t want socialism, you arrogant Kenyan!”; “This sign is the brownest thing on this entire block”), or vile caricatures of the president in whiteface with a Hitler moustache, or decked out like an African witch doctor with a bone through his nose.

The Tea Party movement has never been a single entity and, since its inception, its demographics have remained elusive. A 2010 USA Today/Gallup poll showed that “Tea Partiers” were fairly close to the overall national average in terms of age, education, employment status, and race (6 percent of “non-Hispanic blacks” said they were supporters of the Tea Party, as opposed to 11 percent in the general population). Conservatives interpreted it as incontrovertible proof that they were not, as they claimed the mainstream media portrayed them, overwhelmingly old, Caucasian, male, right-wing, and seething with “white resentment” of minorities.

The poll proved misleading, however, since it surveyed people by asking them whether they considered themselves “supporters” or “opponents” of the movement, not whether they were active members who attended rallies and protests — often described by observers as resembling “a sea of white faces.”

Did overt racism go underground after the civil rights era?
An intriguing study by Michael Tesler of Brown University postulates that “old-fashioned racism” — the overt kind that characterized the Jim Crow era — largely went underground in the decades following the civil rights era. As segregation became a fading memory, racist epithets were no longer acceptable in public. In the 1970s, cultural pressure to be “politically correct” drove race-baiters even further into the shadows. Politicians began resorting to “code words” — “states’ rights,” “entitlement society,” “big government,” “welfare reform” — to communicate their subliminal racial messages to voters.

When Obama was elected, according to Tesler, openly racist speech and behavior — which had not been correlated in sociological studies to white Americans’ partisan preferences in decades, began to return with a vengeance. Tesler demonstrated that such behavior was a much stronger predictor of opposition to Obama than to ideologically similar white Democrats. Republicans may have hated President Bill Clinton in 1993, but nowhere near as much as they hated President Obama — and openly expressed it — in 2009.

Optimists actually believed, in the early days after Obama’s election, that America had finally emerged from its long, dark history of racial strife and blossomed into a new era of “post-racial” politics. Too many echoes of the remote past have surfaced since 2009 to substantiate that hope. Republican politicians openly disrespect President Obama in public and abuse the filibuster with an unprecedented frequency to stall Democratic bills in the Senate. Republican lawmakers churn out a relentless stream of socially conservative bills, in a wave of nostalgia for the halcyon days when women and minorities “knew their place” and didn’t dare question white male authority.

The renewed obsession of many aggrieved conservatives with racial resentment — and their increasingly vocal expression of it, from town halls to Twitter to the House floor — are poisoning our national discourse. If you don’t believe that, just look up "Tea Party racism" on YouTube, or ask a few conservatives what they think about affirmative action, “voter fraud,” or “reverse racism.” If they say we don’t need the Voting Rights Act any longer (at a time when right-wing Republicans all over the country are passing voter suppression laws), if they say affirmative action is racial discrimination against white people and that Obama is a “socialist” (an ad hominem attack made for decades against black leaders), then you’ve got your answer. Code is a useful “tell” about people’s gut antipathies.

‘I’m running for office, for Pete’s sake; I can’t have illegals.’
I doubt that Mitt Romney, who doesn’t really appear to believe in anything, could muster the necessary vitriol to be more than a careless, knee-jerk bigot himself — especially after watching the debate that caught him out in this thoughtless remark about firing the undocumented immigrants he “discovered” were working on his property: “I’m running for office, for Pete’s sake; I can’t have illegals.”

I have no way of knowing what’s in Mitt’s heart, although he probably couldn’t tell you, either, unless he could manage to locate it. But I’m not the first person to observe that his campaign advisers seem to have caught on to the tactics of the kind of good-ole-boy, “dog-whistle” politics that would do Lee Atwater proud. I don’t think Mitt would be above resorting to whatever strategy his advisers suggest will win him the White House — including the snarky campaign slogan, “Obama Isn’t Working,” which calls to mind the offensive racial stereotype of the “lazy black man.” I can only judge his words, using my trusty “embedded” racist-code detector, to interpret for the masses the language of oligarchs.

Consider the following coded excerpt from Romney’s victory speech in Manchester, N.H.: “There was a time, not long ago” (translation: three short years), “when each of us could walk a little taller and stand a little straighter” (when a white man was in the Oval Office, God was in His Heaven, and all was right with the world), “because we had a gift that no one else in the world shared” ("we" descendants of Europeans, who have held the reins of empire and colonized the world): “We were Americans” (not Kenyans, Indonesians, Mexicans, or other "foreigners" who don't look like Mayflower Pilgrims, Confederate generals, Archie Bunker, or "Beaver" Cleaver).

“Those days are coming back,” Mitt insists, although I'm not sure why he's implying that the good old days of "American exceptionalism" ever departed - and I'd bet you $10,000, if I had rich parents to borrow it from, that you haven’t heard squat since Dubya left office about any "big-government conspiracy" to round up natural-born Americans and convict them of treason so Obama can revoke their citizenship (unless you've been listening to Glenn Beck lately).

“That’s our destiny,” Mitt concludes his camouflaged riff. (Final translation: “We” are going to take our country back from "them.") And who do the propagandists mean by "them"? The feared and hated "other" that Obama represents to them. Black people, whom Lincoln told slave owners they had to set free. Red people, written out of Eurocentric American history after centuries of denial that they were here before us. And brown people, straining at our southern border, who will one day outnumber those who reject them, unless "majority whites" herd them all into private-sector prisons or drive them into the Gulf of Mexico.

Then behold! The ruling class will live happily ever after in a white-bread, corporate-owned, feudal America, complete with dirt-poor Anglo peasants, a land of "opportunity" that’s never going to lose the permanent Republican majority that Karl Rove always promised.

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This blog post was first published as an opinion column by The Zest of Orange (Hudson Valley Views with a Twist), described by its editors as "an informative, scrappy, argumentative, contrarian, and thoroughly entertaining site sure to delight some readers and infuriate others."