Dear Friend and Reader,<\/p>\n
WHAT A DAY. Aretha Franklin in that great hat singing the best version of “America” I’ve ever heard, Barack Obama’s speech to the nation, watching Bush take off in his helicopter, never to return (hopefully), followed by the frightening and sudden illnesses and recoveries of Senators Byrd and Kennedy at the luncheon.<\/p>\n
And, yet, as the parade goes on with those funny-dressed girls from Mobile, Alabama and the Lesbian and Gay Band Association, I’m subdued.<\/p>\n
Must be disenfranchised-itis, that feeling you get when someone’s taken your civil rights and traded it like a playing card to step-up to the greater good. It’s the feeling you get when you’re a woman who’s been sexually harassed by a coworker, but he’s such a damn good programmer that the company chooses to promote him, not fire him. It’s also the feeling you get when a fundamentalist Christian who thinks you don’t deserve basic human rights is allowed to perform the invocation at the Presidential inauguration, because there are some things that he and the president\u0412\u00a0do<\/a><\/em> agree on<\/a>.<\/p>\n Pastor Rick Warren, the evangelical leader that has spoken out, loudly, against marriage equality and a woman’s right to choose, gave the invocation at Obama’s inauguration this afternoon. And I want to know why.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As President Obama stated in his speech today, we are a nation comprised of people from every country in the world, and of many faiths — and that is not a weakness, it’s an asset. We are stronger for our diversity, but it’s not the actual diversity that makes us that way, it’s the fact that we respect our differences.<\/p>\n But sometimes we don’t. Sixty years ago, actually far fewer years ago, there would<\/em> be some restaurants in DC that wouldn’t have let Barack Obama’s father in. We shake our heads in shame at that portion of our history, and if the father of Eugenics<\/a> were alive today, I can promise you he wouldn’t be within 1000 miles of that podium today. Because it’s a definitive fact in this day and age that racism is wrong. The jury’s still out on homosexuality.<\/p>\n I recognize that these issues are personal to me, and that it makes me more invested than someone who is not gay, who wasn’t on the phone with an immigration attorney today asking if there are any avenues at all for same-sex couples, asking if there’s any chance at all of being with the person I love in the country I know, and been told, “no.” My relationship means nothing in the eyes of the law, and I am invested in changing that.<\/p>\n And, while it is the responsibility of me and my community to stand up and fight for our rights, it’s also the job of the privileged outsider to recognize wrongdoing. This issue, giving a homophobic reverend the greatest honor a religious figure can get at an inauguration, can’t be balanced out by having an openly gay bishop<\/a> give the invocation at an inaugural event on Sunday, or by letting the queer band march in the parade. Civil rights isn’t a game of even stevens.<\/p>\n I voted for Barack Obama, and that was probably my happiest day of 2008. But using my civil rights as a bargaining chip to placate the Christian right demographic is wrong. There were so many other reverends. Why’d he have to choose Warren?<\/p>\n Yours & truly,<\/p>\n Rachel Asher<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dear Friend and Reader, WHAT A DAY. Aretha Franklin in that great hat singing the best version of “America” I’ve ever heard, Barack Obama’s speech to the nation, watching Bush take off in his helicopter, never to return (hopefully), followed by the frightening and sudden illnesses and recoveries of Senators Byrd and Kennedy at the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[526,762,585],"tags":[36,297,52,924,912,923,855,117,922,348],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9890"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9890"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9890\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}