WHEN PRESIDENT BUSH ANNOUNCED his intention of opportunistically pandering to the lowest common denominator of Fundamentalist Christian hatefulness by assaulting gays and lesbians with a Constitutional amendment prohibiting their marriage, I linked to an Andrew Sullivan piece about a lawyer who believed the Bush proposal was a Trojan Horse maliciously intended to undermine the entire Bill of Rights. I agree with the lawyer, and I wrote in detail of how the proposed amendment was at the very least an expression of the ever-dangerous fundamentalist passion for theocracy. (This pre-election commentary, entitled "Dreadful Alternatives," is here.) In a number of subsequent posts I also predicted Bush's anti-homosexual campaign would encourage a new wave of gay bashing and lesbian trashing. That this is correct is proven absolutely by an infuriating news report available here and an associated thread of Lucianne.com commentary – too much of it disturbingly hateful – linked here.
The military's purge of vitally needed Arabic and Farsi linguists is an outrage; it proves that restoration of 1950s sexual bigotry is more important to the Bush Administration than defeating terrorist Islam. I can't say I am surprised: the administration's escalating war on homosexuals is of a kind with its chastity-only disinformation about condoms and its censorship of birth control information. Not only does Bush want to re-impose the Herbert Hoover economy; he also wants to force homosexuality back into the dark closet of "the love that dare not say its name" and reduce sexual expression in general to the furtive back-seat couplings of the desire-is-shameful era. Again I apologize for my woefully mistaken vote: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Posted by Loren at January 14, 2005 06:53 AM