Equality Has A Party, And It Ain’t the GOP
By As Malaclypse notes, the great Patrick Neilsen Hayden has a perfect response to the idea that opposing marriage discrimination has become a bipatrisan cause:
Cranky moment. Over on Twitter, our Abi retweets a tweet by the generally excellent George Takei. In case Twitter is failwhaling, I’ll reproduce his remark: “Same-sex marriage was passed in NY by a Republican-controlled Senate. Equality has no party, freedom no partisans.”
George Takei is a guy who spent a big part of World War II in American concentration camps, and emerged to be a huge advocate of more democracy and equal rights for everybody. He was on Star Trek. He helped get LA’s new subway system going. He recorded this. His Totally Awesome Human Being credits are, well, astronomical.
But this is bullshit. “Same-sex marriage was passed in NY by a Republican-controlled Senate.” Yes, by 29 out of 30 Democratic state senators and 4 out of 32 Republicans. “Equality has no party?” That’s not what the numbers say.
Don’t mistake my political outlook. In New York State, just as at the federal level, the Democrats are nothing better than the party of the sane billionaires. “Let’s not actually kill everyone and take their money, let’s keep them alive and healthy and in a state of eternal indenture to the powerful” is their idea of progressivism. But you know something, it’s actually better than “let’s kill everyone and take their money.”
And you know something else? 29 out of 30 Democratic state senators voted for SSM. 4 out of 32 Republicans did. And Takei is claiming that “equality has no party.”
Great way to treat your friends.
Great way to treat the people that actually worked on this year after year. Want to look at how many times the (Democrat-controlled) New York Assembly passed SSM?
No, let’s lionize the four Republicans who “bravely” changed their minds, after a covert group of Republican donor billionaires promised to defend them from their bigot constituents, as documented in this terrific New York Times story. Profiles in courage. Yeah, let’s put these guys on stamps, instead of the people who actually worked for this when it wasn’t safe to do so.
More than one person in my corner of the twittoblogoverse has mordantly observed that 5-to-10 years from now, right-wing Republicans will be claiming that they passed same-sex marriage over Democratic opposition. They will indeed. And idiotic, sentimental, pudding-headed nonsense like this tweet from George Takei (who is generally more awesome than I will ever be in a million years) is what will enable them.
Exactly right. We’ve already seen this movie with the “liberal northern Republicans who were being excommunicated from the party supported civil rights, so actually conservatives supported civil rights too” routine.