About Me
LIBERAL CREDENTIALS: My parents were both literally Hippies and I was raised to respect individual freedom and all progressive values. I have been a LGBT activist since high school, and as an adult I have typically voted either Socialist or Green, and occasionally Democrat.
WHAT’S CHANGED: As with so many people, 9/11 mostly. But the seed of my dissatisfaction with the American Left goes back to the hypocrisy during the Clinton Administration. I know, I was just a kid then, but my Mom was very active on the local NOW board. She resigned when it refused to pass a resolution condemning the President’s relationships with Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky, which really were no different from any other occasion of sexual harassment by a corporate executive of young women at the workplace.
After 9/11, I did not oppose the invasion of Afghanistan to topple the Taliban and try to capture Osama bin Laden. Besides the Taliban’s support of Al-Qaeda, it was also a ruthless regime, unparalleled in its intolerance of other beliefs and its atrocities against women and homosexuals. It made me realize that despite what I was brought up to believe, there is such a thing as a just war. Nonetheless, after the USA’s invasion of Iraq, I voted for Russ Feingold in 2004, because of his singular activism against President Bush’s overreaching.
I have remained generally antiwar, but lately the even more absurd overreaching of the American Left has made me reevaluate my position. The last straw came during the controversy surrounding the speech given by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at Columbia University on September 25, 2007. I have no quarrel with those who supported him being allowed to speak. But I saw far too many of the Left support President Ahmadinejad himself, apparently just because he opposes the USA’s involvement in Iraq.
The Ahmadinejad regime is at least as bad as was the Taliban’s in Afghanistan. Women are stoned to death for the slightest sexual infractions while the men with whom they infracted get off easy. Homosexuals are beaten, tortured, and then beheaded or hung. When asked about this at Columbia, Ahmadinejad claimed that there are no homosexuals in Iran. It is easy to see why.
I always thought “War on Terror†was a stupid phrase, and continue to believe much of it has as much to do with filling the pockets of the President’s and many other Demoblicans’ and Republicrats’ friends and campaign contributors as it has to do with domestic security. Those questions aside, however, I am continually amazed by how many of my Progressive friends do not seem to understand that Al-Qaeda and other radical jihadists present a dire, double threat. In the short term, we have the threat of another 9/11 type attack. Worse, in the long term, if Radical Islam comes to dominate the globe, all the Progressive freedoms that we cherish so dearly — and which, frankly, keep a loud-mouth lesbian like me out of serious trouble — will disappear. In such a world, the very people who supported Mahmoud Ahmadinejad this week would be the first to find themselves at the end of a rope.
WHAT I PLAN TO DO: Speak out, to begin with, like I am doing here. It will probabaly cause me a lot of grief among the people with whom I have traditionally socialized. I don’t much care.
I am also going to change my voting habits. In LOCAL and STATE elections, I will continue to vote for Progressives, be they Socialist, Green or Democrat. In NATIONAL elections, however, I will vote for whichever candidate I believe will do the best job at opposing Al-Qaeda and other radical jihadists. When Russ Feingold comes up for reelection in 2010, I might even have to hold my nose — get a gas mask, really — and vote, for the first time, for a Republican. Oh, how I wish Joe Lieberman was from Wisconsin!!!
