What are women, Jews, and gays – and those who care about them – going to do now in preparation for 2012?
By Heidi Li on December 24, 2008 at 12:00 PM in Current Affairs
[Originally posted at Heidi Li's Potpourri]
If you are a Jew, a woman, a gay person or a somebody who is not any of these but cares about somebody who is, and you voted for President-elect Obama in the primaries or the general election, read Katha Pollitt (article reprinted,with light annotation, below). Than ask yourself some tough questions:
- Why did you vote for then-Senator Obama?
- Has he met your expectations so far?
- Do you think he will in the future?
If you are unhappy with President-elect Obama’s conduct now, what are you doing to work toward a better alternative candidate to support in 2012? If you think you will want an alternative, you better start working on that problem now, because the soon to be incumbent is already working to make sure he is the automatic choice for the Democrats in 2012, and that he maintains the money machine he created – depending on the precedent of foregoing public funding – to ensure that he will again be the Democratic nominee.
We have had one-term presidents in this country – usually succeeded by a successful candidate from the opposing party (e.g. G.H.W. Bush followed by William Jefferson Clinton; Jimmy Carter followed by Ronald Reagan).
Now, there may be a Republican out there who you would be happy to see become president in 2012.
But if you want an alternative to a Republican follow-up to the current term of President-elect Obama; and if you are have misgivings about President-elect Obama, for whatever reason, you had better start organizing around a different option for 2012, be that person currently an Independent or currently a Democrat.
My own view is that President-elect Obama, under the banner of empty p.c. talk, has taken real steps – ranging from the retention of Jon Favreau to Warren invitation to the cabinet appointments of Bob Gates and Ray Lahod – to erode whatever vestiges of a two-party system we have had in this country. President-elect Obama has not ever and does not now speak for liberalism; he speaks for himself. But he will enjoy a tremendous advantage in getting the 2012 Democratic Party nomination: the Democratic Party ensured that for itself by rigging his receiving it this year in Denver. That is going to discourage any Democrat from taking him on. Of course, depending on how much damage he does to himself Mr. Obama may make it easy for the Democrats to nominate somebody an alternative by deciding to step aside, as Lyndon Johnon chose to do in declining to see renomination in 1968, a move that did not work out too terribly well for liberals or conservatives as it brought us Richard Nixon, one of the most disgraced and disgraceful Presidents our country has ever had to endure.
Make the jump to read the Pollitt essay.
Opinion
Rick Warren is an insulting choice
By Katha Pollitt
December 22, 2008
To understand how angry and disappointed many Democrats are that Barack
Obama has invited evangelical preacher Rick Warren to give the
invocation at his inaugural, imagine if a President-elect John McCain
had offered this unique honor to the Rev. Al Sharpton — or the Rev.
Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. I know, it’s hard to picture: John McCain would
never do that in a million years. Republicans respect their base even
when, as in McCain’s case, it doesn’t really return the favor.
Only Democrats, it seems, reward their most loyal supporters –
feminists, gays, liberals, opponents of the war, members of the
reality-based community — by elbowing them aside to embrace their
opponents instead.
Most Americans who’ve heard of Warren know him as the teddy-bearish,
Hawaiian-shirted head of the Saddleback megachurch in Orange County and
the author of “The Purpose Driven Life.” Perhaps they also know he’s
the rare right-wing Christian pastor who sometimes talks about poverty
and global warming and HIV. His concern for those issues has given him
a reputation as a moderate and has made him the darling of Democratic
Party think tanks, ever hoping to break the Republican lock on the
white evangelical vote.
But on the signal issues of the religious right he is, as he himself has said, as orthodox as James Dobson.
And as inflammatory. Warren doesn’t just oppose gay marriage, he’s
compared it to incest and pedophilia. He doesn’t just want to ban
abortion, he’s compared women who terminate pregnancies to Nazis and
the pro-choice position to Holocaust denial. (Hmmm … If a fertilized
egg is as precious as a born Jewish human being, does that mean a born
Jewish human being is only as valuable as a fertilized egg?)
Speaking of Jews, Warren has publicly stated his belief that they will
burn in hell, presumably along with everyone else who hasn’t accepted
his particular brand of Christianity (i.e., the vast majority of people
in the world). And forget about evolution — the existence of
homosexuals, he’s argued, disproves Darwin. And while we may not know
how old the Earth is, the Saddleback website assures us that dinosaurs
and humans coexisted.
Warren claims that his views are mainstream, pointing out that in 30
states, the majority of voters have banned gay marriage. Popular
doesn’t mean right, of course, but regardless of what Americans think
about gay marriage, on other so-called social issues, he’s way out in
far-right field.
Take abortion. Most Americans, whatever their personal feelings, are
pro-choice. On election day, anti-choice initiatives went down to
defeat in all three states where they were on the ballot. Most
Americans do not think the one-third of American women who terminate a
pregnancy are running a concentration camp in their wombs, and would
have no trouble choosing between saving a Jew from a gas chamber and a
fertilized egg from a fire at the clinic.
Or take marriage. At his Saddleback Church, wifely submission is
official doctrine: The church website tells women to defer to their
husband’s “leadership” even when he’s wrong on important issues, such
as finances. Never mind if she’s an accountant and he flunked long
division, or if she wants to beef up the kids’ college fund and he
wants to buy shares in the Brooklyn Bridge. The godly answer is
supposed to be “yes, dear.” Is elevating this male chauvinist how
President-elect Obama thanks women, who gave him more than half his
votes?
Or take foreign policy. In electing Obama, Americans overwhelmingly
rejected President Bush’s Wild West approach to foreign policy.
Apparently Warren didn’t get that memo either. Unlike many evangelical
preachers, he issued a statement against torture, but despite his
access to Bush, he told Beliefnet.com that he never raised the subject
of torture with him. (“I just didn’t have the opportunity,” he said –
although he apparently found plenty of time to lecture Obama about
abortion.)
On “Hannity & Colmes,” he agreed that the president of Iran,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, should be killed because “the Bible says God puts
government on Earth to punish evildoers.” Really? The Bible says the
United States should murder the leaders of other sovereign states? How
many other heads of state does Warren want to do away with? If
Ahmadinejad, who is, after all, a more-or-less democratically elected
leader, had shared his inauguration with an imam who had called on
national television for the assassination of President Bush, Americans
would be calling for the nuking of Tehran.
In a news conference Thursday, Obama defended the choice of Warren: “It
is important for the country to come together even though we may have
disagreements on certain social issues.” That’s all very well, but
excuse me if I don’t feel all warm and fuzzy. Obama won thanks to the
strenuous efforts of people who’ve spent the last eight years appalled
by the Bush administration’s wars and violations of human rights, its
attacks on gays and women, its denigration of science, its general
pandering to bigotry and ignorance in the name of God.
I’m all for building bridges, but honoring Warren, who insults Obama’s
base as perverts and murderers, is definitely a bridge too far.
Katha Pollitt, a poet, essayist and critic, writes the “Subject to
Debate” column in the Nation. She is the author, most recently, of
“Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories.”
, the basis for the Best Motion Picture Nominee (Golden Globes) starring Brad Pitt.
, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
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