I don’t have a transcript of it, but maybe I will track it down later. I was watching a segment of the Morning Joe show on MSNBC this morning when I saw Joe Scarborough express a somewhat curious point of view. In essence, he was expressing a certain sense of bewilderment that liberals would see it a good thing that gays and lesbians can now (knock on wood) serve openly in our military.
There was a lot left unsaid in what Scarborough was communicating. For example, there is the hint of a premise there that people should struggle to avoid serving in the military. You know, if you are exempt, why volunteer? But that’s an odd premise when you have an all-volunteer military. It’s also an odd premise if you sincerely value and respect military service as Republicans from Pensacola claim to.
Another thing left unsaid is that gays shouldn’t want to fight because they’re sissies. Scarborough exudes that kind of attitude, and it seems to genuinely confuse him. It’s as if he can’t picture a gay man if they aren’t giving relationship advice to Carrie Bradshaw. It’s a juvenile worldview.
But I think the main thing is that Scarborough is completely blind to why liberals and the LGBT community care about gays being treated equally under the law. It’s true, most liberals and most gays are not fighting to end the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy so that they can go themselves to the nearest recruitment center and get shipped off to Kandahar. That’s not the point. The point is to fight for what is right. It’s not more complicated than that. Gay people should be able to serve in the military if they want to, and they shouldn’t be asked to be dishonest in order to serve.
We can make better arguments than that, but that is all it is really about. That’s all the fight for gay marriage is about. It’s about treating people fairly and equally, and about not discriminating against people for things that they can’t change and shouldn’t even be asked to change.
That Scarborough is oblivious to this goes a long way towards explaining why he affiliates himself with conservatives. People who are always trying to figure out what it is in for them have a hard time understanding why you or I might celebrate the repeal of DADT even though we aren’t gay and/or have no intention of serving in the military.
Barring all that, one could just demonstrate some emapthy, a quality in seriously short supply in some of those good conservative “Christians”.
Empathy would be a very good thing, but equal treatment under the law is what’s required!
Scarborough is a conservative hack. Nothing to see there. The tragedy of it is that he’s considered a non-partisan villager in good standing. We get Olbernman, conservatives get Beck and we all agree to shake hands and call Scarborough the Reasonable Man in the Middle.
There’s another unspoken assumption, too: that liberals are reflexively anti-military, so why would we want to encourage anyone to serve?
Have you ever heard of Kohlberg’s Stades of Moral Development ?
Take a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlberg's_stages_of_moral_development
It’s an interesting classification. If we use this classification to analyse politics, it’s pretty evident that republicans in general operate at a lower level that democrats.
well, Kurt Vonnegut had these guys’ number when he called them “psychopathic personalities” in his final book.
it’s very difficult for people born without empathy to put themselves in the other guy’s shoes, or to support anything that doesn’t directly benefit them.
it’s been a long time since 1917 and 1789, when the rich perhaps learned why it’s important to keep the proles well-fed, employed, and financially secure. well-fed, employed, secure proles don’t rise up en masse and kill rich people.
Scarborough’s whole persona screams the declaration that once one adds facts and logic to an argument an opinion becomes closer to obsolete, at least his kind, so if he ever proposed a well reasoned show he’d be out of a job in a heartbeat.
Ahhhhh, but there’s the rub, you see. In the political world of conservatives, gays are gay because they choose to be. While we, and probably a goodly number of people in this country who are Republicans, believe that being gay is something that is in you at birth. It is only because the Republicans are so beholden to the religious fundamentalists in their coalition that they absolutely must approach the issue from the “gay is a choice” point of view. It is just not politically tenable in GOP to ever entertain the notion that you are born gay. If you dare do such a thing, you will only open up a whole can of worms on which they currently have a very tight lid.
Espousing the view that gays choose to be gay allows the GOP and their religious crazies a Get-Ot-Of-Jail-Free Card on the whole issue of gay rights and allows them to hold fast to the notion that these are “special rights”, not part of the inalienable rights accorded to all in the Constitution.
How do you think the Southern Baptists would react if all of the sudden GOP’ers started talking crazy talk about gays being born gay? Their primitive brains would explode.