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avramA lot of people seem to have decided that it was gay marriage that handed Bush four more years. Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe maybe. There’s a real danger now that Democrats will start blaming gays for the Bush victory. Not the same way we blame Nader for 2000, but in a hectoring sort of way: We told you to wait twenty or thirty years for lasting social change to work its way through state legislatures, not rush into a judicial solution. Now see what you’ve done! Don’t.
We’ve been through a similar strait before. Up until the ’60s, the South pretty much belonged to the Democratic Party’s conservative wing. In 1964, when LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act into law, he knew it’d cost his party the South. He even said to one of his aides, as he signed it, “We have just lost the South for a generation,” and he was right. Barry Goldwater appealed to southern bigots with his “southern strategy” and took a big chunk of the deep south, his own home state, and no other states. In 1968 the south all went either Republican or American Independent.
Did Johnson make a mistake? No. He was faced with a clear moral decision — between political expediency and racial justice — and made the right choice. Those justices in Massachusetts made the right choice too.
We’ve been through a similar strait before. Up until the ’60s, the South pretty much belonged to the Democratic Party’s conservative wing. In 1964, when LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act into law, he knew it’d cost his party the South. He even said to one of his aides, as he signed it, “We have just lost the South for a generation,” and he was right. Barry Goldwater appealed to southern bigots with his “southern strategy” and took a big chunk of the deep south, his own home state, and no other states. In 1968 the south all went either Republican or American Independent.
Did Johnson make a mistake? No. He was faced with a clear moral decision — between political expediency and racial justice — and made the right choice. Those justices in Massachusetts made the right choice too.
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Date: 2004-11-04 05:03 am (UTC)