Three Unfortunate Opinions
Lots of crap happening these days. I have three opinions that I’m not sure what to do with, they don’t feel orthodox but right now they feel correct to me.
I don’t present these as completely formed. Please comment if you disagree. I’m trying to sort out what I feel is “true” in these areas.
Gay marriage is not under threat and gay men should stop centering themselves in the aftermath of the dismantling of Roe v Wade.
Today was an actual, material, concrete loss for reproductive rights. A true step back in the rights of women1. It had nothing to do with gay men. And yet my social feed is flooded with gay men talking about how “we’re next”.
But we’re not, and to me it’s very clear why. This country has never taken away rights from wealthy white men. Patriarchy and misogyny are stronger than homophobia. Did you ever wonder why the gay marriage suddenly accelerated so quickly, going from “it’ll never happen” to “whoa, I’m married”? A lot of gay white men had money to buy expensive plates at fundraisers and get an audience with politicians. The rate of progress from 1995 to 2015 for marriage equality is pretty unmatched by another civil rights movement.
This country is very comfortable taking away rights from women. I do not think it will do the same for white men, even if they are gay.We will not have significant Federal gun control legislation anytime soon.
I actually said this on a vlog post like… 5 years ago and it’s still true. Particularly people who really want no one to have any guns… it’s just not going to happen. I know a lot of people that have guns. I know a handful of people that have assault weapons. They would appear to be reasonable people; they aren’t the nutjobs that we portray when we talk about “guys with little dicks that want to show their manhood, take their fucking guns away”.
Something else was pointed out to me recently… yes other countries have enacted significant gun control. But I don’t think any other nation had a huge gun industry already going that they then had to shut down, or if they did, they didn’t have as much a comment to free market capitalism as our country purports to have. In other words, trying to ban guns is like trying to ban cigarettes: you can maybe make some progress but you’re trying to dismantle a billion-dollar industry that has millions of customers in a country that is built on the idea of a free market.
A question I’ve wondered lately as a thought experiment is: “What if we had no significant gun legislation for the next 10 years? Are there other actions we could take to mitigate the number of gun-related deaths we have in the country?”
I hope people that know better with more access to power are also asking this question, and not just fundraising on the evergreen “we’ve got to pass a law” idea, which never seems to get any closer.
3. The January 6 Insurrection is both an end state and a cautionary tale to the “revolutionary” left.
The insurrection was anti-democracy and illegal and deadly. And yet, there are many people on the left that speak in revolutionary terms. Particularly today I see a lot of “voting doesn’t work, we need to pick up a brick”. Where does this language lead? As I get older I’m definitely an incrementalist, one of those annoying liberals that’s like “you need to work the system”, so I just wonder where the talk of “overturning the system” ends… doesn’t it end with some form of storming the capitol? Or worse, does it end with putting a bunch of marginalized people at risk in the streets while white, college-educated leftists foment unrest while gaining social media followers and Patreon subscribers? I’ll be honest, I’m always a little skeptical when someone whose parents paid for the Manhattan apartment after college talks about “worker’s rights”.
It also makes me think some people would be okay with the January 6 insurrection if it were for the “right” reasons. Is that true?
If I’m being honest, I kind of think… yes. But then that means I’m not really against the idea of an insurrection. Just an insurrection for the wrong reasons. But then I shouldn’t be criticizing people for storming the capitol at all.
You see how I’ve typed myself into another corner? There’s definitely a part of me that sympathizes with “the whole system is rotten” thinking… but on the left where does that lead, really? Does it actually lead to violent protest and attacking government spaces? And does arguing against those tactics mean you are arguing for the traditional political process?
Related: does writing postcards to voters literally do anything?2
Yes, people with uteruses. I agree. But it seems like such a quibbling distraction at this moment to make this correction, because I do believe that the history of legislation against abortion/birth control/etc has been about controlling women, and wrangling their perceived “power” over men. But I also feel bad for leaving out trans men that have uteruses. Language matters in terms of inclusion, but also language matters in terms of persuasion. I think when we right about pro-choice issues we are mostly talking about its connection to a legacy of oppression of women, not just specifically people uteruses, but then I also end up typing myself into a corner where I don’t know what to think. I just think “people with uteruses” is much clunkier and sometimes I feel we need to deal with the main thrust of a fascistic force and worry about the secondary and tertiary issues later. But I could also argue against myself on that point which should be the name of my memoir.
You’re not supposed to only have one footnote, I think. So here’s a second one.