Tax Day Tea Party Protests

You’ve got to give it to the media: they have been putting up a strong fight to de-legitimize the Tea Party Tax Day Protests. They’ve called the participants extremists, Republican tools, crazies… and still, people came. I was one of the nearly 10,000 people at the St. Louis protest Wednesday. While the atmosphere wasn’t as intense as the protest February 27th (after all, that protest was a close-knit 1500 people) it was still exciting and I think everyone left feeling proud to be American.

The media obfuscates the intentions of the protests, saying that they were only about taxes or anti-Obama rallies. MSNBC, the beacon of truth, said on television today that it can’t believe people are protesting having taxes taken from their paychecks when so many people are without jobs right now.

I can’t speak for every person at every Tea Party, but most of them were average Americans who had never been to a protest before (they had a show of hands) and were just fed-up with spending that won’t be paid for generations. (Essentially stealing from our grandchildren.) THAT is what the tea parties were about: a demand for effective policies to get us out of the crisis without putting our country at a disadvantage. Grassroots activism, like Tea Parties, is exactly what the Right needs now. These were average Americans, fighting the good fight, practicing their right to assemble.

Juvenal and the Juvenile

Courtesy of Eve Samborn, we have this amusing satire on liberal “tolerance.” Assuming, that is, giving new meaning to Juvenal’s adage that difficile est satunam non scribere, “the difficult thing is not to write satire,” that satire need not be intentional. In response to College Republican’s “Conservative Coming out Day” (an admittedly absurd event, with all due charity to our younger brothers in the faith), Ms. Samborn is rather upset that conservatives would dare compare their plight to that of homosexuals:

At best, the chosen event name represents gross negligence. At worst, it misappropriates the term “coming out,” a long-standing rhetorical symbol of gay liberation, to serve a movement that oppresses and marginalizes the LGBTQIA community. This linguistic theft is both offensive and morally wrong.

And by golly, she means it. Your humble servant offered this waggish reply:

The author’s appropriation of the word “oppression,” historically used to describe enslavement, systematic violent repression, or denial of basic citizenship rights such as the right to vote, is patently offensive when used to describe the conditions of gays in our society. The author’s implicit contention is that not redefining marriage to suit every possible carnal configuration which wishes to win legitimacy in our society is equivalent to the Black Codes or the Fugitive Slave Laws. By belittling the historical struggle of African-Americans, women and others for basic rights the author is obviously harboring crypto-racist and crypto-misogynistic tendencies.

Ms. Sanborn is simply part of a general trend in gay rhetoric to convert inconveniences into necessities. Bob and Ted, great guys though they are, have to draw up a contract if they want to divide their property between them or explicitly declare who has to be at whose deathbed. But waitaminnit–Jack and Jill get all that in a package deal with that ceremony down at the courthouse! Therefore–ohmygod–Bob and Ted are oppressed! Nevermind they have the same rights as every other citizen, are probably generally more affluent than many minority groups in our society, get the perk of having an average of thousands of sexual partners in their lifetime, and yes, even have the right to marry, as our culture understands marriage. Our definition just doesn’t happen to recognize their carnal preferences.

The false equivocation of anti-gay marriage laws to anti-miscegenation laws (though Ms. Samborn does not spell it out) is absurd. Anti-miscegenation laws were not predicated on a certain definition of marriage, but on a certain conception of race. It was our understanding of race, and not our understanding of marriage which changed and was recognized in Loving v. Virginia. Loving did not require any new conception of the sexual roles in marriage–it just required the casting away of absurd ideas of racial purity.