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Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Luv / Election 2012 Obama Administration Tells Rest of World to Stop Gay Discrimination
Posted by Paul Constant on Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 10:44 AM
This is pretty big news:
The Obama administration bluntly warned the world against gay and lesbian discrimination Tuesday, declaring the U.S. will use foreign assistance as well as diplomacy to back its insistence that gay rights are fully equal to other basic human rights.
Now let's compare Hillary Clnton's statement on this...
"Gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights," she said. "It should never be a crime to be gay."
...with Rick Perry's response:
"Promoting special rights for gays in foreign countries is not in America's interests and not worth a dime of taxpayers' money," a Perry campaign statement said.
What a cocknugget! Perry is employing the tried and tested Republican approach to gay issues, which is to treat basic human rights as "special rights" when they're applied to gay people. This argument can really obfuscate the issue when you're talking about gay marriage—it tends to devolve the conversation into a useless argument about marriage as a right—but here his whinging about "special rights" makes it sound like he's siding with the Taliban. You can't apply an anti-gay-marriage argument to a human rights argument, because then you're arguing against the right to not be stoned to death just for being yourself. (For the record, Mitt Romney's response was just as douchey as Perry's, but it used slightly more diplomatic language. Which is maybe a metaphor for the whole Romney campaign.)
1
Although, I feel that as churches change their rhetoric, the attitude of the populace evolves, and vice versa. I feel that we are trending towards general acceptance. We just have to stop "otherizing" gays in politics, making gay rights special when basically all we want is to have the same rights as everyone else.
2
"The Obama administration bluntly warned the world against gay and lesbian discrimination Tuesday, declaring the U.S. will use foreign assistance as well as diplomacy to back its insistence that gay rights are fully equal to other basic human rights."
Name one Middle Eastern country besides Israel that even recognizes gay rights. Is he declaring war on every Islamic country with that declaration or what?
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