Reply #13: It's not just about Kagan [View All]

From what I understand, although her position on torture is good, her positions on the other issues I mentioned are sketchy at best, and scary at worst. But there is a larger pattern going on here that is contributing to practically every disagreement that the "factions" on this forum have. There seems to be an effort by a few people to exclude liberals--it started years ago with snide comments about pink ponies and whiny babies, continued through the past year or so with comments about how liberals aren't the "base" and shouldn't expect anyone to care about their "pet issues", and has increasingly progressed and poisoned practically every discussion we try to have. It's like there are people here who honestly think that we should only advocate for mainstream liberal issues so long as we don't make any sort of fuss or inconvenience to the Powers that Be.

I do not agree with the assertion that mainstream, time-honored, classic liberal values are somehow "fringe" now, and can be so easily dismissed for the sake of political convenience. Lots of people here pay lip service to issues like reproductive choice and civil equality, but far fewer people would actually moderate their support of a policy, candidate, or nominee for violating one or more of these liberal values. To me, that says "My principles are only important when they're easy to accomplish and convenient. When it might cost me something to uphold them, I'll back down without a fight." Some people actually have that choice, but for those of us whose actual, physical lives are intrinsically connected to these issues? Backing down is tantamount to declaring that we don't value our own families and personal liberties. It's like saying that we find nothing intrinsically worth fighting for in our own lives.

I think that expecting people to quietly cave when their lives and families are at risk is expecting entirely too much. Some say that we need to be "realistic". I say that their definition of "realistic" is self-serving, arbitrary, and weak. Expecting a gay person to display loyalty to a politician who refuses to support gay equality is not realistic--it's flat-out cruel. Expecting a woman to support a Supreme Court nominee who was ready to sign away the body autonomy of women in the 2nd and 3rd trimesters of pregnancy for the sake of political expediency is not realistic--it's perverse. I'd like to see these false, distorted notions of what's "realistic" tossed out of the debate, because they are the biggest cause of the "divisiveness" that some here preach so endlessly about.