Last week, I wrote a diary, "Rick Warren and the martyr mythology of the religious right" about the popular conservative fantasy that Christian martyrdom today is a widespread phenomenon. In a bizarre statement disavowing support for the proposed Ugandan law making homosexuality a capital offense, Warren interjected the claim that "last year, 146,000 Christians around the world were killed because of their faith," which I went to demonstrate is a completely fantasy. Even a reputable website devoted to monitoring Christian martyrs couldn't fill its five-slot featured martyr page with people who had been killed in the last year. Conclusion: Warren is almost certainly off by a factor of 10,000 or more.
But conservative victimology is impervious to facts, and we've just gotten another reminder of that. Yesterday evening, Adam B posted a front-page diary at DKos, "SCOTUS To Hear Case On Right To Know Anti-Gay Signers", about the Supreme Court agreeing to hear a case from Washington State, in which anti-gay activists are seeking to keep private the names of people who signed a anti-gay ballot proposition:
Friday afternoon, the Supreme Court granted a writ of certiorari to hear the case, on the following questions presented:
1. Whether the First Amendment right to privacy in political speech, association, and belief requires strict scrutiny when a state compels public release of identifying information about petition signers.
2. Whether compelled public disclosure of identifying information about petition signers is narrowly tailored to a compelling interest, and whether Petitioners met all the elements required for a preliminary injunction.
Adam goes on to say:
As a First Amendment/election law geek, I find this case disproportionately fascinating on the merits, but there's a deeply troubling aspect to all this.
Because today's order comes right on the heels of Wednesday's order preventing the Northern District of California from controlling broadcast of the Prop 8 trial, which itself was premised in part on this same notion that innocent pro-hetero-marriage folks are being oppressed and harassed by all the evil gays out there, and that these evil gays are so capable of lawlessly intimidating these good people that subsequent legal action against them isn't sufficient. And, so, in both cases, conservatives seek to trample upon the public's right to know in order to shield from scrutiny those who seek to do gays harm.
Y'know, when I first wrote about this case, I was deliberately cagey about who was on which side of it because I wanted folks to focus on the transparency v. privacy issues and not the underlying merits. But we're clearly in the midst of a growing trend of anti-gay activists using legal proceedings to try to paint themselves as poor victims trembling in fear of some nebulous lavender menace, and these pernicious efforts can't be ignored. What they hope to gain from these efforts, I'm not sure. But something's going on here, and it ain't right.
If you really strip it down to it's core, I think this is very simple: Conservatives believe that they have a God-given right to slander, harass, intimidate, and discriminate anyone they damn well please. And they believe that anyone else who objects to what they do is trying to slander, harass, intimidate, and discriminate against them--and therefore must be stopped by the full force of law. What's more, that's what they "understand" the First Amendment is all about. See, for example, Keith Olbermann's volumnuous documentation of the blatherings of Clueless Carrie Prejean, amature porn star.
There's absolutely nothing new to this. American slaveholders fought for their freedom in the Revolutionary War, and were utterly shocked! shocked! when the British offered to free any slaves who escaped and made it to the British lines. They were even more shocked when thousands of slaves did just that... even though there were also black Americans, both free and slave, who also died fighting the British.
Fast forward 180-190 years or so, to 1964, when I was teenager growing up in Northern California, thousands of miles away from the heat of the Southern Civil Rights struggle, when lo and behold, Proposition 14, overturning California's Fair Housing Act, is passed by 2-to-1 margin. It was, in fact, the landslide passage of Prop 14 as much as anything else that convinced the backers of Ronald Reagan that he could win the governor's race in 1966. Prop 14 was based on the simple notion that homeowners had the right to discriminate in selling their house, same as slaveholders had a right to their property. It was struck down by the California Supreme Court two years later--a perfectly predictable result, but one that none-the-less infuriated conservatives as an example of activist liberal judges.
But the thing is, a majority of Americans continued to think that way as late as 1983--the year that the law was passed establishing Martin Luther King Day as a national holiday:
General Social Survey. Question wording: 128. Suppose there is a community-wide vote on the general housing issue. There are two possible laws to vote on: a. One law says that a homeowner can decide for himself whom to sell his house to, even if he prefers not to sell to (negroes/blacks/African-Americans). b. The second law says that a homeowner cannot refuse to sell to someone because of their race or color. Which law would you vote for?
As you can see, even today, 1 in 4 Americans thinks that they should have the "right" to discriminate in selling their home. And woe unto you if you should call them a bigot for it!
With this level of perceived entitlement for racial discrimination today, it's truly remarkable how much progress has been made for gay rights. The conservative "right" to double standards lies at the very core of their belief system--which is why they are so fundamentally hostile to the very idea of America.
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