Saved From Certain Brain-Death

Some of my gay conservative friends wonder why I've become so darned argumentative. They've been working on me for soooo long now, and for a while they thought they had me -- at least halfway there. I was actually flirting, for a while, with changing my party affiliation from Democratic to Libertarian.

Okay, so I considered myself a liberal libertarian. And I told them I'd eat worms before ever considering becoming a Republican. I never had anything but comtempt for Frat Boy Bush, even when my Log Cabin friends were falling all over themselves about how he would save us from "terr-ism." And I have always, ALWAYS hated this war without reservation. But these were all perfectly respectable positions for a libertarian.

I still lean libertarian about some things. I think, for example, that it will be impossible to break the death-grip that big corporations have on America and the world as long as mega-government is enabling them. And I would like to see more of an emphasis, in social activism, on persuasion over coercion. I would, for example, prefer a "scarlet letter" law -- forcing employers who would discriminate against gays to publicly declare this and accept the stigma -- to laws telling people who they can and cannot hire. Employers who violated a full disclosure, or scarlet letter, law would be prosecuted for criminal fraud instead of simply receiving an ineffectual little slap on the wrist, and they'd be forced to think long and hard about whether the stigma was worth standing up for their vaunted "pro-family" principles.

But I have backed away from the abyss. It took some thinking, but I finally saw the light.

The reason I agreed with my gay conservative friends at least partially was that they are at least partially right. Liberals are NOT as solidly liberal as they used to be, and many are outright hypocrites. It is impossible, for example, to vote for a race-baiting, Limbaugh-courting bigot like Hillary Clinton and truly stand for progressive values. Though I respect many of those who support her, I cannot listen to their arguments in her favor and remain calm. If she wins, she will destroy what's left of the Democratic Party, and drive a stake through the already-feebly-beating heart of the Progressive Movement.

The gaycon's argument, however, departs from reason after that.

Lemme see if I can get this (in a manner of speaking) straight. They criticize the liberals for not being liberal enough, but their answer to that is to...become more conservative? Whaaaatheheck?!

If you think the liberals are not liberal enough, you are at least starting out on the right planet. But if you think the most constructive answer to this is to become a conservative, you have blasted off for Pluto.

This is drugs...this is your brain on drugs. If you think the liberals are TOO liberal, you're a conservative. If you think they're not anywhere darn near liberal enough, you are either a liberal yourself or else you are terribly, woefully, lamentably confused.

There is, in fact, only one constructive solution for someone like me, who wishes that the liberals were more liberal -- and that is to stick with the Left and try to help them get back to it. Turn that rocketship around -- a SHARP U-turn -- and head right back to Earth.

That, folks, is today's lesson on Logic 101. After a lapse of a couple of years, more or less, my brain is back off of life-support and functioning on its own. And I promise you'll hear nothing but clear thinking from me from now on.