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Strom and Gay Marriage

To Jerry’s predictions, I would add that the major subcutaneous issue of 2004 will not be Iraq or jobs but “gay marriage.”

More on that in a moment, but my new year’s wish is that every time a right-wing holier-than-thou is seen spouting off this year there will be – like an unwanted “pop-up” – side-by-sides of Strom and his unacknowledged daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams. By the way, for those who still yearn for more, The Washington Post, which of course broke the story, has the best opinion and coverage that I found in print. Although for sheer historical appeal, look at the Minneapolis Star Tribune for a trip down the two-faced “black top.”

The Wilmington Journal reported December 22 that Strom and his family were related several ways to “black” Thurmonds whom they would not have allowed in the front door. The Wilmington Journal is one of those old Southern segregation-era papers that existed because of the dual society that Thurmond and others, from Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi (he of the red suspenders) to Mills Godwin in Virginia (he of the well modulated vowels and Massive Resistance to de-segregation) worked so hard to protect. The Thurmonds were all laboring to maintain a system that had a lie at its core, protecting their droit du seigneur while espousing racial separation.

Julian Bond, quoted in another black paper, says "It is a story, most of all, of great personal hypocrisy," Bond said. "How a man can preach racial separatism and practice interracial sex, in defiance of the then-current laws of his state and defiance of his entire public life. You wonder if Strom Thurmond and others like him ever had any convictions about anything at all."

Strom never publicly recanted his segregationist past, either, to the extent that Wallace or Byrd of West Virginia did. After the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act it became expedient to change the tune, but not to repudiate the past. This is not denial or thoughtless hypocrisy, friends, this is a strategy.

In other words, the upholders of desegregation knew perfectly well that they were creating one code for themselves and one for others and that was the point. They used fear of miscegenation because it worked for them at the polls, and when it no longer did, they dropped it without much of a pause or a pang. All along, Strom on a personal level was probably a gracious guy to black folk, who were after all, “kin,” so it never occurred to him that he was doing anything more than what it took to remain in power.

So where does that leave us in the contemporary political scene, beyond the racial issues that still dog us, from stars-and-bars mania to whether or not Howard Dean can get one white Southerner to vote for him? What other droit du seigneurs is the current administration fighting to protect at the same time that they are denying it to everyone else?

Well. Look no further than the new reason to keep your children locked up: gay marriage. Yes, the GOP rabble will rouse, it could happen to you if you let Dean and his kind into the White House. Race baiting will be replaced by gay bashing, because it resonates in exactly the same nether regions with voters. It’s as irrational as the fear that your white daughter would be tempted by the little black boy down the street. But it all boils down to the same fear: that given enough freedom, those that you are keeping in their places might do to you what you have been doing to them.

So for Karl Rove (where is his Essie Mae?) there is no better candidate than the guy who signed Vermont’s civil union legislation. If I were gay in this country I would be mortgaging my house right now to contribute to Dean’s campaign, or to fund investigations into the sexual proclivities of every top-ranked family valueist around. Who knows how many lives and years of neglect would have been saved if Ms. Washington-Williams had come forward in 1948 instead of 2004?

posted by Evelyn 9:38 AM

Clark doesn't "rule out" VP slot on Dean ticket

The plot thickens... with the polls starting to come fast and furious, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is reporting that in New Hampshire, Wes Clark has said he doesn't "rule out" being the VP on a Howard Dean-Wes Clark ticket. This would be Shrubby and Turdblossom's ticket from hell to deal with. They may have to have Max Schmeling look-alike Tom Ridge shut down the country on Election Day.

posted by Groom 4:15 AM

Fear of Flying

Buried in the seventh paragraph of an article in Saturday's NY Times about the rash (deliberate choice of word) of flight cancellations over the holidays is the news that several of the British Airways no-gos had nothing to do with U.S. air security but are the result of BA pilots refusing to fly with armed marshals on board. At this point, those famous "chatterers" have already caused billions of dollars of economic damage through lost air and hotel revenues and the costs of increased security--not to mention having made the US look--one more time--like the horse's ass of the planet. Why bother to actually blow anything up as long as our crackerjack CIA and FBI can't tell the difference between a Tunisian terrorist and a five-year-old child?

Suppose for a moment, that instead of spending a couple of hundred billion dollars (so far) to roust a second-rate dictator in Iraq who was not actually doing anything to us and was a threat only to his own people, we had spent that money beefing up airport security around the world, electronically screening every passenger and piece of cargo, updating government computers with modern people management software, building relationships with global police forces, hiring people who speak Arabic languages and launching a thousand other homeland security safeguards that would be practically invisible to the public but effective in identifying real threats. We may never eliminate the possibility of terrorist attacks completely but building a solid line of defense is a hell of a lot more useful than completely destroying the world's travel and aviation industries through incompetence and political fear-mongering.

posted by Jerry Bowles 12:04 AM