Queer bashing 2004:

The Boston Globe has a front page story today detailing the President's desire to make "gay marriage" his wedge issue of choice in the upcoming campaign.
I hate it when I am proven right.
Serious Chimes at Midnight readers (that is, all five of you) will recall I've been predicting an orgy of homophobia in campaign 2004 for several months now.
Like the swallows returning to Capistrano, so too does La Famiglia Arbusto return to it's life-giving menu of "wedge issues".
George Bush Jr. may well go down in history as the First President to run for re-election on a promise to deny certain rights to a carefully selected minority.
Rights said minority doesn't even have yet!
Gotta love that doctrine of pre-emption.
The usual suspects will chalk this whole appalling spectacle up to the "southernization" of American politics.
Y'know the forcible introduction of harsh puritanical southern clerical values into the political debate.
That of course is an interesting and suggestive phenomenon...because despite their undeniable electoral strength, the political south has been wrong about so many issues in relentless succession that it calls into question their collective sanity.
They were wrong about the Civil War, wrong about Prohibition, wrong about Civil Rights, wrong about the Viet Nam War and in the end they'll be proven utterly wrong about gay marriage as well.
But not before a lot of people are hurt and humiliated ere long.
Given this record of error and catastrophe is it any wonder the political south follows palpable frauds and liars like Tom Delay or Newt Gingrich?
Given the need to furnish the south with some blood sacrifice is there any doubt Bush will happily deliver up America's gay community to the tender graces of Reaganolaters, brutes and snoops?
But ah, remember the President does this ugly and churlish thing from his heart-he is an authentic man or so Mike Barnicle helplessly sighs.
If it mean a comfortable re-election, George Bush Jr. would happily book time on VH1 tomorrow night to wipe his ass with the original U.S. Constitution.
THAT is the core of his so called authenticity.
Otherwise Bush may steal and lie...but he calls down imprecations and punishment for the loftiest of reasons.
Vain power worshipping, dishonest...but painfully direct when screaming up a mob to oppose a right that as yet doesn't exist.
Bush knows his rabbles, and the GOP's mob is one of the best trained since the Parisian route that executed Marie Antoinette and Robespierre in succession....there is nothing he cannot do, no minority he cannot punish with them on his side.
I'm not saying the whole of the south has gone apeshit crazy, I do assert that the "commanding heights" of the southern polity is controlled by persons