A friend sent this email out today to friends and family:
I've always considered myself a political moderate. I am a southern Democrat -- yes, there are a few of us still around. I support free trade, balanced budgets, a strong defense and a foreign policy based on our national interest.
I am also gay. And today I live in a country whose just-elected President successfully built his electoral coalition on antigay prejudice.
Today I have to recognize myself as a minority, a second-class citizen with less than full rights and constitutional protections, a member of the last group of Americans who can be denigrated without political consequences.
What can I say to republican friends and family who voted for this man? What can they say to me?
After 9/11, George Bush served briefly as a unifying President. But he and his chief strategist, Karl Rove, felt he could win reelection with a base conservative vote, and that he could use polarizing cultural issues to motivate that base. Democratic leaders were shut out of legislative negotiations, the President ceased even lip-service to bipartisanship, and he pursued a strategy tailored to the conservative base of his party and, on economic issues, to the party's business interests. He became, quite deliberately, the great divider of the nation.
The strategy worked. Moral issues were sited as most important by voters Tuesday, more than the economy, terrorism, Iraq, education, environment. He got his base voters out, and they were enough to carry the day.
How were these voters mobilized? The chief tool was antigay prejudice. For the last 18 months, that was the unifying theme of the republican volunteer effort, and it included working to get "antigay marriage" constitutional amendments on the Nov. 2 ballot in as many states as possible. The antigay message was repeated in evangelical churches, independent and denominational, and in communications by many Catholic leaders as well; by the televangelists with their large national constituencies; and even in leaflets distributed by the Republican National Committee in several states, which claimed that Democrats would "ban the Bible."
So, here we are. The President spoke movingly yesterday of coming together and healing the wounds, as did Senator Kerry. Those words ring very hollow with me.
I don't know what fate holds for our country, or exactly how history will judge this president. I do know what I think of him.
Prejudice in whatever form is immoral and dangerous, as it blinds people to the individual and makes it easy to act on hatred. Out of prejudice great wrongs have been committed. I know that there are moral consequences to every action. A president who fans the flames of prejudice, or allows them to be fanned by his electoral operatives, is not a moral person.
A few times in my life things have happened, or one-time opportunities were lost, and I knew immediately there would be consequences years into the future. On those occasions my heart gets a little heavier, and it never again gets quite as light and hopeful as it had been. This is one of those times.
Rand
