Politics, religion, and PMS

[emmagrant01]

I was wondering if 24 hours would pass before the idiots and trolls started making appearances on jedirita's recent post of Senfronia Thompson's speech to the Texas Legislature.

There's already a "You're going to hell and I'll pray for you!" comment -- the irony of someone making that comment to Rita makes my head want to explode.

But there was another comment that really, truly pissed me off. I'll just paste the relevant statement made here:

It is a nice speech, but there are some gaping holes in it, and playing up the Christianity angle really hurts it.

*rolls eyes*


My reply:

It is a nice speech, but there are some gaping holes in it

It's not intended to be a logically sound argument, though. It's a political speech! All she has to do is play the game better than the bigoted idiots who take up most of the space in the state legislature. She has to make them look bad for casting their vote for this ammendment. She has to frame the argument in such a way that their constituents start to ask them uncomfortable questions. She has to say things that get her point across as strongly as possible and that will get her position lots of attention. (Which is clearly happening.)

She has to reframe the discussion about gay marriage, take away the power and meaning they give to words like "family" and "protection", and reframe them from the point of view of tolerance and love. She has to draw analogies to the Civil Rights movement, because that is a recent powerful example of how the majority can be wrong here in the South. Notice how cleverly she does this: she first says the gay rights movement is not the same, but then goes on to plant image after image in the reader's mind of people being treated as second class citizens, all from a first person point of view. It's a classic political trick, and it's brilliantly executed. At the end of her speech, we draw the analogy ourselves, and she never equated the two! After you read or hear this speech, it's difficult to hear "gay marriage" and not immediately think of issues of discrimination and bigotry against a group of people.

playing up the Christianity angle really hurts it.

Here's where it's clear you don't know how politics works in Texas. She uses her faith to do that because she (a) is a Christain, and (b) knows the legislature is full of Christians. If she left it out, her argument would be dismissed as liberal whining.

I'm frankly stunned that you would read this and be critical -- no, worse: condescending. This is Texas politics, for fuck's sake! This is a really good thing to happen here.
+++++


Okay, need coffee now.

Comments

Re: Doesn't really have anything to do with your post but...

[sciencegeek.livejournal.com]

either marriage is a religious rite or it's a civil contract. If it is a religious rite, I support the right of any religion to choose, at its leisure, whether or not it will or will not allow any two people of any kind, to participate in it. Maybe some religions won't allow people whose names have a J in them to wed -- whatever. But if that's the case, the government has specific instructions not to get involved in any religious ceremonies or rites of any kind, and needs to stop giving out marriage licenses, period.

Essentially that's the huge worry of some religions here. If the Federal government gets around to passing the bill which legalises gay marriage across Canada, some religious leaders are worried that they will be forced to perform marriage ceremonies for gay couples, despite the fact that religion and politics are (supposed) to be separate.

"The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation" Pierre Trudeau