Monday, April 12, 2010

Huckabee Is A Moran

OK, we already knew that. But in a recent interview with a College of New Jersey student publication called "the Perspective", he described same-sex marriage and civil unions as "not necessary". The full quote is even worse:
"You don't go ahead and accommodate every behavioral pattern that is against the ideal. That would be like saying, well, there are a lot of people who like to use drugs, so let's go ahead and accommodate those who want who use drugs. There are some people who believe in incest, so we should accommodate them. There are people who believe in polygamy, so we should accommodate them."


Now personally, I have no problem with polygamy but I can see practical reasons for banning it but more to the point, Huck is just jumping on the old slippery-slope fallacy here. Incest and polygamy have nothing to do with homosexuality or same-sex marriage. Incestuous relationships are (almost) always unequal, for a start. When idiots like Huck say "where does it end?", every nation that has legalised same-sex marriage or some comparable arrangement has said it ends at two consenting unrelated adults. This isn't rocket science. People like Huck like to that if you accept one thing, you must automatically accept everything which he says must come after (most of the right does this with socialism too) but reality and legislation don't work like that. It is perfectly possible to say "yes" to same-sex marriage and then, when the sister-fuckers turn up asking to legalise incest, tell them to go to hell.

His views on same-sex raising of children are scarcely more sensible: "Children are not puppies. This is not a time to see if we can experiment and find out, how does this work?". Oh, Mikey, the ship has long since sailed on this one. See, there's this miraculous resarch tool available called "Google" and if you used it, you would discover that there has already been an awful lot of research done into the effects on kids of being raised by same-gender parents. That research says that kids of same-sex couples grow up just as healthy and happy as kids of opposite-sex couples. Besides, if you were really concerned about kids, you would be doing more to promote the raising of children by extended families. Researchers have known for years that the single best arrangement for child-rearing, the one most likely to result in a happy, wall-adjusted child, is the extended family of parents, grantparents, aunts, uncles and cousins who all pitch in to help. There are a number of ways to encourage that. But I don't see Huck pushing them.

In the end, it's becoming increasingly obvious that one simply cannot be both Republican and pro-family. The stagnation (and in many sectors, actual lowering) of real wages has had a devastating effect on families, forcing both parents to work every hour available. I'm not a fifties-nostalgia guy, I don't think a woman's place is in the kitchen but I do think that it's pretty important to have a parent (or other member of the extended family above) at home with the kids. Exactly which parent or family member is for them to work out but yeah, I think it's important that when a kid comes home from school, there's actually someone there. A lot of conservatives claim to think the same thing but they seem incapable of taking the logical next step: That the reason both parents work these days isn't some metaphysical "career woman" demon, it's because the decent working/middle class wages of the fifties which allowed parents to stay home with their kids are a thing of the past. Since the Sixties, unions have been demonised and wages (in constant dollars) have, on average, dropped by around 13% (much more in some sectors) while prices have zoomed upward (utility bills, in constant dollars, verge on outright extortion). You think THAT might have something to do with the growing number of latchkey kids? Here, the state tried to handle that by instituting Child Tax Credit and naturally, the media have now invented the myth of women who make a career out of having babies.

Where was that concern for families during the Prop 8 campaign? Gay people married, formed families and the right campaigned to prevent more families being formed. Some even campaigned to forcibly divorce those who had already married (which would have been a legal nightmare if it had passed). Here where a bunch of morans trying to split families up in the name of being pro-family. And these morans accuse the left of being anti-family.

You cannot claim to be pro-family while also acting as a pawn of a corporate class which is raping the modern family. There exists this prevailing mythology that if you give the corporate class a tax break, they'll expand their business and hire more workers, thus aiding families. It's bollocks, a complete myth. The corporation employs the exact number of people it needs to do the work it needs, at the lowest wage it can get away with paying. If it chooses to expand, it will do so by using the existing business as security and leveraging assets and that's discounting the VAST sector of the economy that doesn't actually make anything physical in the first place. Tax breaks make no difference to what the corporation chooses to do with their business. They're nice, sure and the corporation would like to have as many as possible but they don't actually affect the way it does business. But I digress.

My point is that supporting the destruction of the working and middle class simply cannot be reconciled with a claim to being pro-family. Being pro-family means supporting a decent wage and healthcare. Corporations will not give those things if they can avoid it. They will not comply with the safety regulations which ensure the breadwinner's safety if they can avoid it (and they often can, as the disaster at Big Branch demonstrated).