To My Latino Friends

Welcome to being a wedge this year -like the gays with marriage equality, and if you give it in a minute we'll see the old people, the sick people, kids, education, and the kitchen sink all picked up and hurled at the Republicans.  Welcome to the 2012 cycle.  But the next time you hear "Oh, this is election year politics" on the DREAM act - here's why it needs to be election year politics.  


In 2010, when it wasn't election year politics, Republicans had no problem killing their own idea just to sick their finger in Obama's eye.  The DREAM Act sailed through the House on a largely party-line vote, and then couldn't get cloture in the Senate.  If the GOP wanted this to be done through the Congress, like they claim now, they could simply drop their filibuster (which is technically still ongoing), vote for cloture on this bill, and then vote to pass it as presented by the House, and it would be on Obama's desk as a permanent solution by the end of the week.  They do not want that - and no matter what they say now, they do no want this policy at all.  During the primaries, Texas had its own version of a DREAM act that provided for in-state tuition for children who were illegal immigrants through no fault of their own.  It was signed by Rick Perry.  And in the debates, the other candidates piled on him for taking this stand and for defending it.  Mitt Romney took up the issue of educating children of illegal immigrants like a pair of scissors and went after Rick Perry as though he were a gay kid with queer hair.  The media acts as though we haven't heard Romney's long term plan - but we have.  Self-deportation, slam the borders shut, let Mexico die on our doorstep, we don't care.  


For them to get that, first, the President must fail.  They cheer for failure and blame it all on Obama.  Every time there is bad news they set their heads alight and scream "Obama's fault! Obama's fault!" and dance around the media and Fox & Friends.  But we are still in a stalled economy.  We still have major social issues that must be addressed.  Regardless of party, if the President fails, if the Office of the President fails  in its Constitutionally-mandated mission, then by definition the whole works fails.  If two years has taught us nothing, is that these particular Republicans, this Tea Party driven insurgency, are perfectly willing to not just drive us off a cliff, but to put the pedal to the metal.  On Immigration, and yes the timing looks very blatantly political, especially considering the memo was brought to him in February of 2011, the President has actually accomplished something, and they are spinning like mad to make this a bad thing.  "It isn't permanent!" they cry, and they're right, it's not.  If Romney gets elected, or if the GOP retains effective control of the Legislature, it never will be, either.  They are right, this is still not a win.  This is still Democrats having to play politics with the party that started the mess and refuses - quite literally - to stop the filibustering talk and bluster, and actually do things.

They've all got to go, all the way down the ticket.  This is being used in an election year to force Republicans to start answering the question of what do they want.  They have to be called to account for wedging off votes, for breaking up the electorate, then digging in their heels and refusing to do anything or put forward a single idea to accomplish a single goal.  If you'd like to not be a wedge issue ever again, if you'd like to see reform beyond an executive deferment (that Romney could revoke on Day 1), your best chance is to get every single person you know in every state you know them in and get them to go to the polls and vote Democrat, all the way down the ticket, from President to dog catcher.  If you want to keep the laws on the books that break families with immigrants into pieces, reigns terror over school children, and effectively considers non-Whites as second class humans never mind citizens, then stay home or vote for a Republican down-ticket from the President.

Fred Karger as a Noun

Merriam-Webster defies the term "uncle tom" as follows 

1. a black who is overeager to win the approval of whites (as by obsequious behavior or uncritical acceptance of white values and goals) 

2. a member of low-status group who is overly subservient to or cooperative with authority <the worst floor managers and supervisors by far are women ... Some of them are regular Uncle Toms - Jane Fonda>

The roots of the term are debatably Stowe's, or maybe from minstrel shows, but it matters not - this is the definition that lives in the public consciousness.  I'd like to submit a similar term for the queer community. I vote we strip away Fred Karger as a person, and make im into a noun.

Fred Karger can't be a person.  He simply cannot be a real live flesh-and-blood human being.  Characters like Karger have to be made up. You see, Karger has his bona fides as a gay activist.  Karger founded Californians Against Hate - which has been absolutely positively instrumental in unveiling the Mormon church's involvement in California's Proposition 8, and the National Organization for Marriage's blatant attempt to create and exploit racial divisions in Maine (which is hilarity unto itself, for entirely different reasons). He speaks openly these days of the need of the Republican Party to be "cleansed" of bigotry - and he's right.

He also worked for the President who let tens of thousands of Americans die of AIDS before acknowledging that any such problem existed. 

This is not a matter of the Republican Party's stance on gay rights and Karger's tacit stated support of the party regardless. This is a matter of a party of laissez faire allowing the thought to run to its illogical, immoral conclusion - we help no one, no one, not even to avoid the grave itself. Let the gays die. Let the women die in childbirth. The sick? The elderly? The disabled? Be sick, be old, be cripple, but be it on your own, we shall not help you.  

Karger is old enough to know this, and stayed on that side of the aisle the whole entire time. He was living in California during the AIDS epidemic - and working for the side that wouldn't acknowledge it. What drives a man to work for a leader who lets that man's people die a slow, horrible death? Surely, any such man would be wracked with guilt the rest of his days the moment the error of his ways were made clear. Surely he would at some point see the light, and come crawling home to his people, ready to take on the labors of Hercules to make things right. Maybe this is the reason for Karger's about-face in 2004. Perhaps a rock thrown by God hit him in the head. Perhaps he realized he could no longer carry on aiding and abetting the castigation of his very self, and felt the need to atone for it.  

But this is not a real Saul on the road to Damascus moment for Karger. The scales off the Apostle's eyes, he switched sides and went into the world a new man. But Karger? No, good Fred only gets the mud in his eyes. He chooses to envision a "Clint Eastwood" Republican. But Eastwood isn't really a Republican - he's a libertarian. He said so himself in a 2011 GQ interview. Eastwood, claiming to believe in a politics of leaving everyone alone, surely couldn't - and likely doesn't - support the ultrasound-requiring, gay-marriage-banning, immigrant-hating far right that has so plainly hijacked the Republican Party and taken it for a ride to Fascistville. That seems the sort of place Clint Eastwood would ride into and shoot up. 

But I've gone of track - my argument is that Fred Karger is a noun, and not a person, because his story cannot be real. His reference to a kindred spirit holds no water. The sort of about-face we could potentially view as mayhap private epiphany simply did not happen. And those roots... those awful roots... surely, no subjugated person could ever ever contribute to their own subjugation! That behavior cannot be human. It is the sort of thing you can train an animal to do - to see itself as the natural inferior, to believe that he who holds the food dish holds it by divine right. To hold otherwise, we can speak of no such thing as a human right. If a human can view itself as rightly subjugated, can aid and abet in its subjugation without being viewed as somehow sick or corrupted, then how do we differentiate between the human rightly demanding equality, and the human mistaken regarding his right to that? We can't. We can't have human rights if this is human behavior, because we have to allow for an all-powerful master choosing who is his equal and who is not, since the other party may or may not be correct on the matter. This behavior must be illness or damage of some kind, they cannot be the undertaking of a rational human actor. Therefore, Fred Karger cannot be a real person. He can only be a noun, and I submit the following definition for him: 

1. a gay man who is overeager to further the causes of those who hate gays (as by directly aiding and abetting those who turn a blind eye to the death of scores of homosexuals)

2.  a member of an oppressed group who is overly subservient to the group inflicting that oppression <After driving gays from the party and refusing to seat them at the caucus, you'd have to be a real Fred Karger to be a Republican.>