Voices: Kulturkampf U.S.A.
What is the greatest threat facing America today?
According to a poll illustrated by cartoonist Tim Kreider, Gay Marriage is first with 31 percent of respondents' votes, followed by Saddam (24 percent), "Near-Simultaneous End of 'Sex and the City' and 'Friends' (19 percent), Carbs (17 percent), Aliens (8 percent), and finally with .003 percent of the votes, "This secret pentagon report warning that global warming will cause catastrophic floods, drought, famine, riots, and nuclear wars by 2020."
Yes, it's a joke. Kreider publishes the subversive strip The Pain - When Will it End?" But the very insight that makes the cartoon funny also scares the hell out of me.
Americans are easily distracted. We watch the news or skim the paper, but how many of us honestly want to know what's really going on? We don't want to think about the bills we can't pay or whether the threat in Iraq was great enough to justify so many deaths, disfigurements, depressions, etc. So, we allow ourselves to be distracted from the issues. Most anything will do - celebrity scandal, keeping up with the Joneses, religion, or even the weather.
The GOP knows this and the Bush White House is counting on it. The War On Terror alone is not enough to secure a Bush reelection. If it were, America wouldn't be spiraling out of control into a culture war that could dangerously change the way we are sanctioned to live.
Think the gay marriage debate is just about changing definitions or amending the constitution or a legal right to claim benefits? That's what the radical right wants you to think. The cultural war is not just a campaign reelection strategy.
Not all gay people even want to get married and not all gay people are political activists. But suddenly, just as they began to attain a respectable level of acceptance, they've found themselves under a backlash microscope of ignorant judgment. In Tennessee a divorced, gay father was prohibited from "exposing (his son) to his gay lover(s) and/or his gay lifestyle" until the ACLU intervened.
Pennsylvania legislators are currently stewing over bipartisan legislation supporting the adoption of special needs children that's been soured by the inclusion of amendments banning adoptions not only by same sex couples but also by single persons. The reality of homosexuality has entered the public discourse and our conservative leaders have no intention of stopping with the "protection" of marriage.
Reproductive rights have been attacked with equal aggression. Be it access to emergency contraception or the struggle of a woman to see her life valued as much as the life of her fetus - we've never faced a bigger threat to essential freedoms in my lifetime. Bush has no shame and a messianic complex bigger than Mel Gibson's. And frankly I've become pessimistic. Is an America where justice and tolerance reign just wishful thinking?
It is because of the war that Bush Inc., has declared on its own country, even more so than the one it has declared on the international harbors of terrorism that I will walk the streets in opposition on March 20. People all across the globe will take to the streets on this one-year anniversary of the U.S. bombing and invasion of Iraq to protest America's colonial ideology and to collectively pray for peace. We are not rallying because we lack respect for freedom or military sacrifice or merely because we have some idealistic and unrealistic notion that peace is the answer. The decision to rally is as personal as it is political.
I will march because it's time I reinforced my words with equally powerful action. Because I am outraged that Bush Inc. thinks America is dumb enough to swallow its consistent release of doublespeak propaganda that sugar coats the issues. I will march against intolerance and against blind fundamentalism. Because consistency in how we regard the value of life is not too much to ask.
And because cultural wars should only be fought to open minds and enlighten people, not to punish those with alternative convictions who, by choice or not, are following a less popular spiritual path.
--alicia grega-pikul, 11 March 2004
