I just don't see the efficacy of engaging in culture wars or entering into identity politics. As a philosophical and/or religious question, it's inevitable that it'll be explored; as a political question, it's a rabbit hole that will ensure absolutely nothing else gets accomplished.
If a person, no matter their identification wants to create a stable household and engage in a social institution that is granted to pretty much everyone else in the world, I have no issues with it. If someone lives in peace within the bounds of a fair social society, then I don't see where engaging in private, consenting sexual conduct (which is also conducted by a number of straight people) rises to the level of being a public problem. I emphasize that it does not rise to the level of a public problem, not private problem. Those are two different things. We can believe that certain aspects of others' lives are bad/evil without asking the state to step in. Are 32oz sodas wrong? Was prohibition right? You might respond that this is a bigger issue than soda or prohibition, but EVERYONE thinks their favorite issue is bigger than anything else. That's half the problem in politics today -- unending political myopia and a complete lack of scale. Congress, whether controlled by Democrats or Republicans, is entirely willing to shut down government and not honor its commitments for any reason whatsoever. What objective, measurable benefit is society going to see by giving gays the option of 'curative treatment' or pushing them back to the peripheries of society? What objective, measurable economic or social benefits are voters going to experience? These are core radical centrist political questions. As far as I can see, gay marriage has resulted in negligible levels of chaos, violence or calamity. Society has thus far adapted to this change and the marital institution has not collapsed in on itself. My own marriage has not suffered to any measurable degree by inviting a minority into a profoundly conservative social institution that existed before the advent of Western society. There are two things happening here in 'gays vs. straights world': gay rights and an aggrieved social justice war. I am entirely supportive of people with alternative, consent-based sexual preferences engaging in established social institutions -- an inclusion of minority populations in our melting pot. This is gay rights. I am not, however, in favor of a small, aggrieved minority attempting to compel a majority to change their own lives in order to make the small minority more comfortable. I am not in favor of forcing people to adopt a million different pronouns and destroying our cultural institutions because people want to be referred to as a "mermaid" instead of simply "him" or "her." I am not in favor of pushing polyamory as the new normal. I am not in favor of calling people epithets like "bigoted" or "homophobic" simply because their chosen religion has some specifications about certain people. This is why I'm against contemporary "social justice;" we live in a system of constitutional rule of the majority with the consent of the minority, not vice versa. If THAT'S your war, I agree with it. Otherwise, I think the basic integration of gays who support traditional society is a positive or, at worst, a neutral that doesn't rise to the level of crisis. I am quite clearly not a simple "moderate" or garden variety "centrist." I don't believe in splitting the difference, but I do believe it is essential to make distinctions. This is where I draw my distinction between myself and the Right and Left: I believe in workable solutions within society's confines and opening up societal institutions to citizens. But I don't believe in engaging with extremely small numbers of "social justice warriors," for instance, who believe in "liberation" against this-or-that aggrievement. I am not in favor of taking scissors to our Constitution because some people have hurt feelings. But I am also not in favor of worshiping the facade of an institution even as its values die. Likewise, economically, I make the all-important distinction that progressives don't: between good government initiatives that promote wide growth, increased economic participation, hard scientific advancement, and increased general levels of wealth against bad government initiatives which promote monopoly, cartelism, and unnecessary complication. I make the distinction that conservatives don't: between investment spending and entitlements, as I cynically wonder why politicians rail against entitlement spending while paying lip service to infrastructure and science, and then proceed to cut R&D spending while leaving entitlements largely untouched. I won't attack a religion as a whole when I can distinguish that it is two or three particular sects within the entire religion that are causing political violence. I won't attack either a racial group or the entire law enforcement occupation when I can scale the matter down to a few practical training solutions paired with a basic community outreach effort. Scale and distinction will determine whether we succeed or fail. The Left has lost it, the Right has lost it, and we seem to have lost it also. I think you and Ernie are brilliant and have created something really solid here, but I have strong reservations about the way you're looking at achieving this goal. So I think the questions I would now ask are these: why create a political party if you have no realistic hope of winning? You know that most major donors and corporations give money to both major parties because they want to assure that the incumbents look out for their interests. So who is going to donate money to the cause when you tell them that you will likely never win an election? Why do we want our people, who are already an extremely meager pressure group in the two major parties, to join another new party where they would exert no influence in the political process at all? If they were going to do that, why wouldn't they just hang out with the other bottom feeders in the US Centrist Party, the Reform Party, or any of the other groups that struggle to register as even a blip on the radar and can't even get ballot access in most states? In a republic, it is imperative to get into office in order to effect change. To get into office, you must run palatable candidates. These candidates do not need to read all the polls and our candidates will regularly disagree with orthodoxy (I guarantee it), but they won't win by campaigning with centerpiece positions that make the vast majority of the voting population consider the candidate unelectable. You think the GOP is loving Todd Akin's comments about 'legitimate rape' right about now? No, because he lost an easy race. No single issue or obscure opinion is worth unelectability to me when we have mountains and mountains of work to do. I will quickly and dutifully drop any single position if it endangers the astonishingly large amount of change that will be required to right this ship. It is now time to see the forest for the trees. We are quickly and irrevocably falling into the old political trap of God, gays, and abortion. It destroyed the Reform Party and it is now destroying us before we've even crossed the starting line. The labor participation rate is lower than it's been at any point since the early 1970s, and it continues to drop. Over 10% of the US population are still either involuntarily unemployed or underemployed. Primaries are now being largely decided by a handful of ultrawealthy power brokers. Our budgetary priorities are nonsensical. We just fought and lost an entire war "off the books." Both parties now believe that "deficits don't matter." We have systematically made enemies with just about every country in the Middle East. Japan has committed to build a space elevator before the United States and will be able to conduct space travel for a fraction of our cost in just a few decades, while US astronauts will still be hitching rides on foreign rockets. Our infrastructure is in shambles and we still grant local monopolies to international conglomerates. The debt that we owe China is primarily the result of an embarrassingly large trade deficit. We're going to have to import workers to do our 21st century jobs (the jobs we want), as we still have a 19th century education system, yet the Right pisses and moan about Mexican labor (the jobs we don't want). We push minority children and little girls out of math and science at a young age and then wonder why they don't get good jobs. The Left and Right would love for us to spend our time talking about social issues, because it provides an excellent smoke screen for their profound incompetence. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
