How Far Is Too Far?

How far is too far? Policy can not be about what looks good on your voting card but the issues and how to solve them. Even if you’re an anti-gay-marriage anti-immigrant Republican but somehow you’re for protecting the rights of women against violence, (first, you have to establish for yourself that it’s okay for rape victims to be forced to keep a baby, but once you get over that hump…), you don’t want new people coming into this country because it’s ‘your’ country. (You, presumably white, because your Republican, and in this case, most likely male). We are too lax on immigration, goes the reasoning, and therefore spread too thin financially and not able to control crime. Immigration means losing control of an American idealogue illusion. Internal logic understood. Fear driven, false, but understood as a rationale.

With your anti-immigration stance, you can consider yourself not hateful, not evil, merely protecting the space around you as you don’t think there is enough land to go around. You’re afraid. You’re losing job security, maybe your home, and definitely your sense of security in the American dream of middle class prosperity. You’re holding tight to your values which are based on a 20th century construct heavily rooted in materialism and defined by unabated growth. It’s not working out for you. (Hell, it’s not working out for anyone else either other than the 1% but you can’t, you won’t, move on to the 21st century.)

Now onto gay marriage. For you, marriage is the plastic black and white toy on the top of a wedding cake. A man in a tux. A woman in a long white gown. Both with stony eyes and red ink smeared lips. You don’t want to recognize love of any other kind. Especially as gender identity changes so drastically with both men and women ripped free of last century’s clear cut moulds. It’s scary. Who are you now? Are you supposed to wax your eyebrows and fight for your country? What role do you play as a man? Isn’t being a man about playing a role? What happened to roles?

So now we’re onto women’s rights, specifically domestic violence. You are against violence. You’re a man of god after all. Violence is bad. You like to think of yourself as someone who would protect your fellow human being against harm and that’s the kind of legislation you check yes to. But only if your fellow human being approximates the wedding topper on that cake. They can not be foreign born or in love with someone of the same sex. It’s murky, but the voter scorecard is right there in black and white. Like that wedding topper. And that’s how you vote. You can’t see. You can’t think. And the stalemate that black hole of ignorance imposes on the rest of us makes us really really really scared. How far is too far? This antiquated sect of people just has to enter the modern era for us to survive.

-Chauncey Zalkin

Reaction to article Women Figure Anew in Senate’s Latest Battle in the New York Times 3/14/12: ” Some conservatives are feeling trapped.’I favor the Violence Against Women Act and have supported it at various points over the years, but there are matters put on that bill that almost seem to invite opposition,’ said Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama”