Marriage is love.

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

HRC's Rose-Colored Glasses

Much has been made of HRC's release of the old Texas candidate questionnaire where Harriet Miers said she was cool with gay civil rights. In the tradition of HRC, which habitually has misused a combination of gift-wrapped-survey-question answers and poorly assessed voting history data to paint too-often unrealistically rosy pictures of public officials' views on matters queer, Joe Solomonese tried to gush wishful thinking about a possible Miers open mind into fact to an AP reporter with, "It's only a small window into her thinking, but it certainly, for me, raises the possibility that she's more fair-minded than our opponents are hoping."

The facts are anything but pretty. Miers supported gay civil rights the same way Shrub did -- completely toothlessly. The question was asked in such a way that she could answer in the affirmative without having to commit to supporting civil rights legislation to make it happen. A local group with about as much political savvy as Aunt Pittypat used the piss-poor HRC suggested language of the time. No wonder it was HRC that brought it to the attention of AmericaBlog on Monday and, subsequently, CNN, and that all manner of queers out there, seemingly predominantly boys, are gleeful that they're going to get a pro-gay justice. They're fools.

The only thing in the works at the time with any hope of making actual change was the Lawrence case, the overturning of which by higher courts to decriminalize consensual sex for queers Miers vehemently opposed. Added to that is her staunch support for a church, Valley View Christian, that is known in Dallas as being firmly anti-queer-equality. Added to that is her slavish support of Shrub and his pandering to all the worst forces of anti-queer hate. The combination of these are the true measure of her character where we're concerned.

Don't take my word for it. Kelly Shackelford, president of the Texas Policy Council of Focus on the Family member association, the Free Market Foundation, and an openly declared foe of legislation forbidding antigay civil rights discrimination and one who has known Miers well, said he, too, could have answered yes to the gay civil rights question. He went further, saying Miers has "basic Texas down-home values."

If you're queer or queer-supportive, Miers isn't your good buddy. Everything that matters in her history says she is antagonistic to your right to marry, that she lamely equivocates when your parental rights are at stake, and that she isn't going to be there for you when hate comes to shove any more than she was there for the Texas version of you when her hero, Shrub, made the highly unusual power move of walking onto the legislative floor to personally buttonhole lobby Texas legislators out of voting for a gay-inclusive hate crimes bill.

Miers is the sort who doesn't believe in affirmative action or other mandated forms of ensuring a fair playing field. She's in the camp of those who think as libertarians on the subject, believing that market forces will temper the discriminatory desires of business owners and managers to acceptable levels. She lacks the fundamental understanding that there are no such acceptable levels and that those who who will not play by the rules of a fair marketplace out of their own sense of right and wrong ought not be permitted to play in it at all without close enough supervision and penalties to guarantee their acceptable behavior.


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