sorting out causes and signs

[bronze_ribbons]

Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker:

In the past forty years, the definition of marriage has indeed been changed, not by any homosexual master plan but by an epidemic of heterosexual divorce. Marriage is a social good—Bush is certainly right about that—but it has become a disposable good. The causes of divorce are manifold, and they do not include gay marriage. (The state with the nation’s lowest divorce rate, Massachusetts, is also the only state where gay marriage is legal.) The day after the Senate vote, USA Today reported that “the number of active-duty soldiers getting divorced has been rising sharply with deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq.” The divorce rate among Army enlisted personnel since 2003, the year of the invasion of Iraq, is up twenty-eight per cent. For officers the increase is seventy-eight per cent. Perhaps this, rather than the imaginary threat of same-sex marriage, is something that the President should look into.

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Davidson County readers: The League of Women Voters is hosting a forum for school board candidates this Thursday.


Me, I'm trying to research my way past all the shouting. I'd like to find solid reasons to vote for any of the candidates -- at the moment, none of them have convinced me. I don't trust Brooks -- being a conservative is not a deal-breaker in my book, but her chief allies on our metro council are the type of pushy Christian that gives the South a bad name.

Brooks appears to be smarter (or at least more devious) than they are -- in trying to assess for myself where she truly stands re: "intelligent design," what I found was support for scientists teaching science, support for school choice, and criticism of her predecessor's objection to ID curricula from a shouldn't-all-views-be-explored perspective.

That noted, this last strikes me as disingenuous after reading her post in favor of Metro Council's parental-right-to-know resolution last fall, which was in response to a civil rights video that portrayed homosexuality in a positive light. I'm having trouble reconciling "children need to be exposed to different points of view" with "parents should be able to veto any subject matter they disagree with," which is how these posts read to me at face value.

On a visceral level, my impression of Brooks is that she's smug and evasive (and not especially careful with spelling, at least in her blog): regular readers know about my allergy to "we all"-esque statements and "surely no one could object to [position of choice]" stylings, and she hasn't satisfactorily answered a number of challenging questions posed to her by my neighbors. That said, I am impressed with how active she's been in the homeschooling community, and her campaign for re-election in August has been more impressive so far than Porter's (which does not yet have an online presence, to my knowledge). For that matter, I don't know where Porter herself stands on any of the issues.

Am I bending over backwards to be fair? Perhaps. Porter is endorsed by several people who I respect, but I haven't yet talked to them to find out why I should vote for her and not just against Kay Brooks. In that realm, though, I could also factor in Brooks's statement that non-renewal of the superintendent's contract was the first time she'd agreed with her predecessor on anything -- her predecessor being a progressive Episcopal priest very much respected among parents I count among my friends.

...


All of that said, I just now read this post, where Kay Brooks characterizes A Place at the Table as follows:

I'm of the mind that the core mission of public education is very narrow. You'll have a hard time convincing me that it includes indoctrination by the Southern Poverty Law Center via their video on civil rights. This video, we're told, equates the struggle by certain parties to have their form of mutual love accepted as on par with the struggle by people of color to obtain full personhood.

This is language similar to that used by Carolyn Baldwin Tucker (the most virulently homophobic member of Metro Council) in her ravings against homosexuality. For me, this is the deal-breaker: I will not vote for someone who shares Tucker's narrow-mindedness on this issue.

"Certain parties," indeed. That's a significant segment of my neighborhood you trivialized there, Ms. Brooks.

Comments

[xanthophyllippa.livejournal.com]

*snugs mechaieh*

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

I tell you, this making up my own mind is so much damn work...

*sighs*

*snugs back*

[xanthophyllippa.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know - it's just so tiring to not follow the idiots like lemmings.

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

Mm... being a contrarian comes naturally to me (only kid in my Civics class to back Mondale/Ferraro openly, etc.). What's draining is feeling like there's less and less room for nuanced positions in public discourse -- but it was probably ever so.

... And it's painful watching people with worthy intentions not get taken seriously because they're so shrill and over-the-top and ultimately presumptuous with their rhetoric (i.e., the "you're a horrible, cold-blooded excuse of a human being who's going to hell and/or hates all ________ [insert demographic] if you can't see that ________________ [insert absolutist position]" school of attempted persuasion).

*sigh* Plants, cats, and dogs. One of these years, I'm going to succumb to the urge to give up talking to people. Well, except the BYM. And you. And maybe a few others. I suppose I could try thinking of all y'all as honorary cats and dogs, but that's getting too twisted even for me, so I guess I'll just have to continue keeping my inner Misanthropic Drama Queen in check.

[swooop.livejournal.com]

Jaysus. Amazing in this day and age.

And in the great minds department, I was listening to Rossini earlier today. It seemed that kind of day...

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

It's due back at the library tomorrow. ;-) (Checked it out because I really loved the broadcast of La scala di seta on "World of Opera" last month.

Now I want to listen to Traffic, but the CD player is having one of its occasional seizures. Grrr. Might be time for a Pat Benatar LP... ;-)

[ellid.livejournal.com]

I was also amused/appalled to note that Ms. Brooks seemingly hasn't figured out that subjects must agree with objects, and also thinks the plural of "Moore" is "Moore's." I wouldn't vote for her on those grounds alone, let alone her obvious bigotry.

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

That stuff pains me as well, but I generally try to cut people some slack when it comes to off-the-cuff email/blogs -- my minister and several other people near to me are dead hapless when it comes to spelling and punctuation, in spite of being way smarter than me on many other matters -- and one of the most frequent charges I see hurled about from both sides of the conservative-liberal divide is inconsistency of evaluation (i.e., judging one's opponents by stricter standards than those applied to one's allies), which is why I feel compelled to be careful about specifying how and why I won't vote for which candidates. I haven't seen anything Porter's written yet (which is a separate source of frustration), so I don't feel comfortable dismissing Brooks for that particular inadequacy when it's possible Porter may suffer from the same flaw.

[ellid.livejournal.com]

Good point - I've known some terrifyingly smart people who couldn't punctuate to save their lives.

[kellanine.livejournal.com]

Me on that New Yorker article: "DUDE."

Right on.