“cruel, racist and counterproductive”

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 7/5/11

A better definition of totalitarianism might be the desire by any means necessary to get people you don’t know and don’t like to do what you want them to do. That would be the NYTs virtually always in how it writes about the South, that would be Hillary in Catholic Italy at the head of the gay parade – actually that would be Hillary everywhere where “universal values” – meaning hers – are demanded: Every land is Hillaryland. This would be the Phil Specter “wall of sound” syndrome which has cast the shadow these past 60 years: Our music is louder and we will play it everywhere and relentlessly and we will wear you down. And then we will send in the soldiers and the hillbilly preachers and the ambassadors and anthropologists and at the end of the world we will send in Hillary. And that would be Michele Bachmann in her strong support for DOMA, unconstitutional by any standard. It has always been a problem in an America without walls; in the Don Draper post-war creation where America is everywhere you can see, everything you can imagine; an America where everybody walks in everyone else’s garden.

Regarding DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, enacted September 21, 1996 and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, whereby the federal government defines what marriage is and who may marry, either in Provincetown or Peoria, Rick Perry has a better idea. In his book “Fed Up!” he writes, “We are a diverse people - incapable of being governed from a faraway capital by people who do not share our values. Recognizing this fact is critical to the preservation of a free state. Federalism enables us to live united as a nation, with a federal government that is focused on our national security and that has specific enumerated powers, while we live in states with like-minded people who share our values and beliefs. Crucial to understanding federalism in modern-day America is the concept of mobility, or “the ability to vote with your feet.” If you don’t support the death penalty and citizens packing a pistol, don’t come to Texas. If you don’t like medicinal marijuana and gay marriage, don’t move to California.”

Politicians today like to use the work “evolved.” They say President Obama is “evolving” on gay marriage, meaning it was not expedient to support it last time but it may be this time. It may even be “evolved” to throw Joe Biden off the ticket and quickly replace him with New York governor Andrew Cuomo because he signed gay marriage into law recently, the New York Post reports.

But when Jean Cretien, who was then prime minister of Canada, brought it up during the war on Iraq, it seemed to be about more than the right of gay people in Quebec to be free. It was about George W. Bush. It was about what would really piss them off in Texas and gay marriage seemed just the ticket.

Because there is now and always has been antipathy between the cerebral cold places and the heart-driven warm places, here, there and everywhere. Thus today when the NYT describes the “do-it-yourself anti-immigrant schemes” of Nikki Haley’s South Carolina, Nathan Deal’s Georgia and Robert Bentley’s Alabama, the language is identical to that which drove New York to invade the South in 1860: “cruel, racist and counterproductive.” What is new is that today Arizona, Utah and Indiana share in their wrath. The “South” is growing. Or maybe the North is retreating.