Wednesday Words of Wisdom: Malcolm X

I believe in the brotherhood of man, all men, but I don’t believe in brotherhood with anybody who doesn’t want brotherhood with me. I believe in treating people right, but I’m not going to waste my time trying to treat somebody right who doesn’t know how to return the treatment.
—Malcolm X

I’m still working on my words about Baltimore, but this quote comes to mind as  informative and deeply applicable.  A lot of poor folks haven’t been treated right for a long time, and as Malcolm’s contemporary once said, “a hard rain’s a gonna fall” if things don’t change soon.

No Homosexuals Allowed!

Just when you think people can’t get any worse, a deeper and more sinister evil oozes out of the black hearts of men.

They’re at it again. Last week I ripped the state of Kansas after it’s House of Representatives passed a bill that, if it becomes law, will bring institutionalized bigotry to The Sunflower State.  The good news, however, was that so many good, angry people are putting so much heat on Kansas’ Governor and State Senate that passage of their bill in it’s present form is not likely to pass–not if the Republican incumbents have any hopes of an easy re-election.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/02/14/1277718/-Kansas-State-Senators-face-Backlash-and-plot-retreat-A-Report-from-the-Capital

Now, only a few days later, similar laws have raced through both the Arizona House and Senate, leaving that state teetering on the edge of a full-blown, retrograde, hate-fueled Jim Crow reality.  The question is: who, in present day, twenty-first century America, thinks like this?

Cast members of Duck Dynasty before their Hee Haw make-overs.

It’s rhetorical question, of course–I’ve already pointed at the Westboro Baptist Church, and that Dick Duck Dynasty yahoo made a splash not too long ago spouting his own noxious ideas for revision of The Declaration of Independence and, sadly enough, a small but loud minority of Americans, most of them lazy Christians either too lazy to read what Jesus actually said about treating other people, or too filled with fear and anger to care.  Not that he had anything at all to say about gays.

I suppose that it is natural and expected that bigots push back against the progress our nation has achieved in the past few years, both in securing equal rights in many states, and defending those gains, but I have a hard time taking it.  For most of my life, I was largely ambivalent to the political aspects of sexuality, accepting but not particularly invested, but the older I become the more angry I become, the more annoyed by the inanity of it all.  What is more small and petty than targeting an individual for social and political exclusion on the basis of who they happen to love?  Why can’t people keep their hate to themselves, mind their own business, and get on with their own lives?

The justification is ridiculous–it would be laugh-out-loud hilarious if it weren’t so awful. According to the fiends responsible for these attempts to undermine the constitution, requiring Christians–or anyone who adopts a religion or belief that hates homosexuality–to treat gays as actual human beings and citizens, is tantamount to religious persecution.  So, in essence, the vast Christian majority of the USA is supposedly being discriminated by the small percentage of people who are gay.  I’d honestly had no idea that the faith was perched on such tenuous ground.

On the plus side, these backwards-assed redneck regional political assaults on liberty won’t go unnoticed on a national scale, and while they’ll undoubtably find support in aging, rural fundamentalists the Republican party–which just can’t seem to catch a break despite a train wreck of recent Presidential missteps–is going find itself guilty by association with young voters, most of whom don’t see what the big deal is, but will definitely wonder why so much time and effort is being devoted to the persecution of a tiny segment of the population, when young people are facing some of the worst economic realities in recent history.