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Monday, October 26, 2015

Bernie Sanders. Gay Marriage, and Who Was for it First

Rachel Maddow actually made a good point in her interview with Bernie-even though I was irritated when she started as it looked to me that she was trying to amplify Bernie's point that he's the pure one as he was for gay marriage-along with Keystone and opposed to TPP first.

I sent her some tweets grousing that she ought to ask him about gun control about immigration. Yet, in retrospect I jumped the gun on her too fast as she was not going for a cheap score for Bernie as I had initially assumed.

She kind of called Bernie on what he thinks it matters that he got there first on gay marriage. .

He argued that the fact that he voted against DOMA in the late 90s shows that he has the leadership progressives need to be able to count on in the future.

At the Jefferson--Jackson dinner, he had come out baldly and said that what Hillary said about her husband's support of DOMA in the 90s-that it was a defensive move against a political anti gay climate-was rewriting history, and 'is just not true.'

She actually did a beautiful job in turning it around on him a little by reminding him of when he was against a gay marriage bill in Vermont. His answer was that it was just a very tough time in Vermont at the time, he was for civil unions and Vermont was first on this, but that he didn't think the time was right yet for gay marriage.

She pointed out that this kind of sounds like the same political calculation Bill Clinton made on DADT and DOMA. Bernie then backpedaled a little and said that the point he was making was simply that its revisionist history to argue that DOMA was defensive when it wasn't.

But this doesn't save his purist position. Bernie tends to argue that he was Right from the beginning-this was the exact name of a book by Pat Buchanan, interestingly- on virtually every progressive issue.

But by admitting that even he had once not supported gay marriage shows that even Bernie Sanders is human and has considered political calculations. I don't think this makes him a bad guy by any stretch. It just shows he's an earthly politician, not a Heavenly saint.

But too often his supporters act as if he is. And he here is trying to posture this way by acting as if unless you were right on every progressive issue since the time of Creation, you are a total fraud.

Rachel actually shows this is not true of Bernie either. It's not true even of Saint Elizabeth Warren!

So Rachel actually disarmed his major thrust. He admits that you can't always fault politicians for considering political calculations, you can't always be Right from the beginning. This sort of dogmatic attitude belongs on the Right. No wonder Pat Buchanan wrote that book.

http://www.amazon.com/Right-Beginning-Patrick-J-Buchanan/dp/0786102152/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1445921089&sr=8-1&keywords=pat+buchanan+right+from+the+beginning

As for declaring that DOMA was not a defensive action against a homophobic environment-how does he know? He knows for a fact that

1. It wasn't

2. Bill Clinton knows it wasn't.

To me it's hard to say whether or not it was or not: it's sort of a tactical debate. How does he know that Clinton didn't sincerely believe that it was?

So Rachel got it right after all.

I always admire Barney Frank. No one waited longer to see the day that the country he served so well for so many years would finally recognize his right to marry. Yet, he didn't fault John Kerry in 2004 for opposing gay marriage.

He agrees that Kerry was right to do so at the time as the politics weren't right yet. 

http://www.amazon.com/Frank-Politics-Society-Same-Sex-Marriage/dp/0374280304/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1445921334&sr=8-1&keywords=barney+frank

I admire this attitude for it shows that despite how this unfairly disadvantaged him, to his bones, he is a pragmatist not an ideologue.

I think that what many Democrats are realizing now-particularly after HRC's outstanding Benghazi performance-is that change going forward for now will be incremental.

Hillary's hardheaded pragmatism and competence is just what we need.

http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/10/hillary-clinton-sounded-presidential-at.html

P.S. There's actually a lot more we can say about the false purity narrative. Purists are always the bane of any party or political agenda. It's why the GOP is such a mess: the base is terribly purist.

Purists can never find consensus and find the whole act of political compromise necessary to govern as dirty.

Maybe some members of the LGBT community look back and think Bernie deserves special praise for being one of the few in Congress not to vote for DOMA.

Yet, this didn't stop the law and Clinton opposing it certainly wouldn't have stopped it.

As Garry Wills notes, often it's the pragmatist who actually get things done in electoral office. Lincoln didn't run on ending slavery but he did. Just like Obama didn't run on gay marriage but that is his legacy.

http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Conservative-Garry-Wills/dp/0385089775/ref=as_sl_pc_tf_til?tag=lameanov-20&linkCode=w00&linkId=6VIDYNJDL4QUAOIE&creativeASIN=0385089775


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