On AZ Prop 102

Don't you just bet the guy in the middle is a Mormon for McCain? Geeze. Rapture already and leave the rest of us alone!
Thanks to my bud VL for this one.

AZ's Annual Mecham Memorial March of the Morons

Led by such towering giants of wisdom and statecraft as Mesa Representative Karen Johnson and (former) Parker Representative Babara Blewster, Arizona's Republican legislature is queuing up again to show the world just exactly what "a bubble shy of plumb" looks like.

Johnson, known for her bill to arm school students, and Blewster, who once expressed amazement that a House colleague is Jewish because she lacks a "big hook nose," have done more than all other American women combined to prove the proposition that women really ought to stay barefoot and pregnant.

In grateful recognition of her contributions to gender equality, Blewster's GOP colleagues have nominated her observation that "even African-Americans are more advanced than Native Americans" be engraved in tasteful 106-point red, white, and blue type over their cloakroom door.

Blewster joins Johnson to lead their Republican colleagues in periodic competitions for the coveted "Bacon Award." (Note: Long-time Zonies believe that the prize was originally meant to have been called the Beacon Award, but the GOP proofreader preferred the subtle pork allusion.) The Bacon Award goes to the Republican with the highest score on the Slackjawed Stupid Index, the SSI, a measure of Arizona GOP legislators' intellectual capacity that is administered quarterly. (It doesn't take long.)

However, keen GOP-watchers know that springtime really brings out AZ Republicans' primordial urge to pee in the gene pool. For it is in late April that they conduct their annual Edwin Mecham Memorial March of the Morons. Mecham, you may recall, graced the state as governor until he was impeached for various things. But not before inviting a national boycott of Arizona for his decision to prevent the state from celebrating Martin Luther King Day.

This year's Grand Marshall, of course, is GOP Sen. Russell Pearce. Pearce made national headlines recently when he introduced the fondly-titled "employer sanctions" measure, which actually turned out to be the "bankrupt Arizona" bill. It penalizes employers who knowingly hire undocumented immigrants to do hideous things like pick crops, bus tables, and make beds. . Consequently, these workers are fleeing our state, taking their wallets with them. The result? Many AZ agricultural, service, entertainment, mining, construction, and landscaping businesses are filing for bankruptcy< This has the effect of shutting off the entire downstream flow of their tax dollars. In all, Pearce has given us home foreclosures, lagging rentals, closed businesses, swelling unemployment rolls, gutted school budgets, stalled highway repairs, and even more crumbling overpasses. His brilliance is surpassed only by his emulation of Jesus.

Pearce has more genius in store for us, no doubt, but he may soon be eclipsed by Scottsdale's GOP Rep. John Kavanagh. Kavanagh's newest brainchild would bar state public university and community college students from organizing groups based on race--you know, like the Black Business Students' Association and the Cinco De Mayo Festival planning committee. Kavanagh, whom we assume is illiterate, certainly hasn't read that a major corporation is cooling on Oklahoma. The reason? It's anti-diversity, homophobic climate, which is being carefully nurtured by GOP state Rep. Sally Kern. Nor has he read the Constitution, which, I'm pretty sure, guarantees freedom of association.

Not to be outdone, the heavily "Christian" and Republican Center for AZ Policy, and that darling Cathi Harrod, its main stone-thrower, are showcasing their sagacity again this year by pushing still yet again one more time for an anti-gay amendment, SCR 1042.

As you know, even though McCain supported them (of course) the sane among us kicked their asses last year by making Arizona the only state in the nation to defeat their nasty little marriage proposition. Of course it wasn't just anti-marriage and it wasn't just anti-gay. In its infinite wisdom, the Center pushed for language that also would have outlawed any cohabiting couple from receiving the privileges and benefits of marriage. I suppose we can expect them to sharpen their focus this year just to queers.

Gee, Zonies who aren't straight, white, fascist, and phobic have a lot to look forward to. Time to haul out the shit-kickers.

But wait! What's that giant sucking sound?

Oh. That's just bottom-feeding. The AZ Republican caucus is over at the neo Salt River having breakfast with GOP presidential contender and Rev. Rightwing Racist Homophobe Hagee courtier, John McCain. Oh, you heard the part about his calling Cindy the "c" word. Nice crowd.

Misogyny in America

As night follows day, any rise in homophobia is paralleled by a rise in woman-hating. So it shouldn’t surprise anybody that, after two decades of virulent gay-hating from the Right, we are seeing a proud and public form of misogyny in America we haven’t seen since, oh, George Gobel.

I’m not suggesting a cause-effect relationship here. I’m saying that homophobia is fundamentally also an expression of misogyny. When a gay man is bashed, he’s being savaged because he isn’t conforming to his assigned male supremacist role. He is stepping OUT of that role defiantly because—regardless of the actual acrobatics—he is perceived to be willfully assuming the role of a woman. He is being punished for breaking ranks but despised for (symbolically) behaving like a girl.

Hillary Clinton is just the most obvious lightening rod for the woman-hating tribes. She, too, is stepping OUT of the assigned role and defiantly competing with men as an equal.

The symbolism is inescapable and the consequences predictable and the punishment swift and ceaseless. She can’t easily be attacked physically. (Oh, it could happen and it might still happen, but it can’t be done easily. She has Secret Service protection.)

But she can be subjected to incessant ridicule and subversion from the mainstream corporate media. It is a given that she would be. The corporation, that playpen of male domination into which frustrated gladiatorial violence is sublimated in glass ceilings and the myth of masculine commentatorial “gravitas.” The media, the collective mouthpiece of male-supremacist culture which speaks, as misogyny always does, out of the mouths of both men and women; otherwise the game would be too, too obvious.

After Fox, the most visible (but by no means the only) culprit from our vantage lately, anyway, is MSNBC: Chris Matthews, Tucker Carlson, David Shuster. I’ve already commented on Matthews and Carlson. Their buy-in to male supremacy is as deep and unexamined as the color of their eyes. Carlson, especially, exudes contempt for women and people of color unless they know their proper places: cheerleaders for the Right. It’s just as incessant but more subtle, oily and oblique, the gentleman's country-club idiom. The "vaginal-American" exchange comes to mind, a coinage that somehow managed to demean everybody all at once. While Carlson didn't utter it, he didn't rebuke it either. He used it for all the yukkety-yuk value he could get.

Matthews’ misogyny is much more obvious. He’s a brawler, like McCain. (Remember when McCain joked--joked, please--"that the reason Chelsea is so ugly is that Janet Reno is her father"? There's something core frightening about any adult male who will attack any girl, let alone publically and by means of a classically misogynistic/homophobic formula. It's of a piece with McCain's violent, racist joke "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran," and it makes me wonder what goes on behind his closed doors.)

What else would we expect? Matthews' fixation with Hillary Clinton is legendary, and the depths of his misogyny as expressed in his incessant trivializing commentary about her is profoundly shocking as much for what he says as for his utter cluelessness about it. He breathes misogyny in and out, in and out, like oxygen, and is no less oblivious to it. It’s his natural element, taken for granted.

And that is what tripped up Shuster. Apart from the stunning contrast between how goons like McCain and Matthews ignore the Bush twins and pillory Chelsea, and the nastiness of the whore metaphor, I was offended because it never even once occurred to Shuster NOT to use that metaphor for someone's daughter. It was just so natural because it is just so natural. Just so Don Imus.

Women in America are waking up. Hillary and Chelsea are all of us, and we are seeing a play we don't like very much. In fact, we are enraged.

More on this subject anon.

Obama Blows It the All-American Way

All along, I've wanted to be more impressed with Obama than I have been. Ever since his convention speech, my Impress-O-Meter has been dropping at least a degree a day, which means that, as of early last week, Obama was hovering somewhere around mid-snore.

That was then. But when I found out that he has been sharing the South Carolina podium with an explicit gay-basher, has been pimping himself to gay-hating African Americans in a state that generally hasn't seen fit to join civilization, Obama dropped off my radar entirely.

Obama has now announced that he sees some of us as expendable, thinks some may be sacrificed to the bigotry of others in his rush for the White House. Even when that bigotry is all too ready to reduce fellow citizens to second-class status. Even when it is happy to beat, rape, and shoot them, take their children from them, fire them for no reason, and deny them the common rights of every other American. Even when that bigotry is willing to tie them to a rail fence and leave them to die. Even when that bigotry lives in the hearts of people who should know better.

I've learned to expect exactly this disgusting expediency of politicians. If VP and Mrs. Cheney can sacrifice their own daughter's constitutional rights for the sake of politics, I guess anything goes.

I've also learned that African Americans, and Mormons, and others whose experience as Americans has been sullied by someone else's bigotry, will not necessarily have learned anything. As a matter of fact, I've come to expect more bigotry from those who've suffered most, when they've begun to secure a better place in the pecking order. So often they seem obliged to hurl abuse on those who come behind them. After all, there are always "rational" explanations for why it's different this time, why this time, it's justifiable. That's the nature of bigotry. There's always a "reason," and often a biblical "reason."

As for Obama's excuses about engaging the services of anti-gay entertainer Donnie McClurkin, let's put it this way. The gay "debate" is like the evolution "debate." Only one side has the facts. When that's the case, treating both sides as equally deserving of serious consideration is misleading. It's just another PR deception in a long list of PR deceptions to which Americans have been deliberately subjected for several decades now.

A similar phenomenon is clouding our discussion about immigration. Politicians of both parties are willing to yield the highest principles--liberty, equality, and justice for all--to the lowest perversions of principle. None seems willing to stand for fairness, justice, and mercy, to articulate our complicity in the migration north, or to call us to an equitable solution.

For the last several election cycles, we Americans have either introduced or tolerated the introduction of distortion and bigotry--as if either has merit--into our public debate. If we have become a nation unable to discern fact from fiction, if we are rapidly becoming a nation of angry, ignorant haters, is it any wonder?