Obama, American Idol and the repudiation of the gay haters.
Some nice thoughts in a Los Angeles Times article by Ann Powers regarding the larger message of this year’s American Idol:
Lambert and Allen might be the most unlikely pair on television this year, but their bond has helped make this singing competition more than just entertainment, no matter which man wins.
“It is fantasy,” said Ross. “Out there in the real world people aren’t getting along so comfortably. The guy who sings musical theater and dresses flamboyantly isn’t necessarily going to be bonding with the jock types in high school.
But sometimes a mirror image has the power of pointing toward a future reality. It’s not sufficient in itself but it adjoins to another bunch of things that seem to be happening in our society, old prejudices falling away.”
As the writer suggests, the wider acceptance between those of “assumed” opposing viewpoints, such as Evangelical Christians and Gay Americans, is the new norm, and thank goodness for that.
It may be me, but I’ve always thought most people in general are accepting of others and the opposition are the exception to the rule, but you’d never know it sometimes by what you see in politics. The Republican party has made a business of promoting the divide between Americans on this issue. The entertainment media, fortunately, has not listened and have spent decades showing us what we already see - it’s life and it’s no big deal. Gay and straight people aren’t standing around defining themselves by their orientation when they’re shopping at the supermarket. Younger people, used to openly gay students in their schools, are probably embarrassed and stupified by the need for government to want to make these definitions at all.
As suggested in Salon, this is an unfortunate turn for people like Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachmann, Marilyn Musgrave and others. If the Republicans don’t have homosexuality as a wedge issue, who do they really represent? We already know it’s a party followed by insecure, homophobic, intellectually-challenged cowards (and those who tolerate them) - but get rid of the homophobic and the gay haters and the few lingering idiots left are hardly worth building a movement around - unless you consider ignorance a virtue.
Nonetheless, this drive away from division and hatefulness is the welcome residue of the new Obama administration. I’ve always equated the Bush administration to the poisonous atmosphere I remember from one of my worst jobs, a place where employees were pitted against each other and the head of the company was bipolar train wreck; when you’re there, immersed in this kind of place for a very long time, you can forget what the world was before it and what the possibilities are beyond it. It was only when I got the will to leave and pulled myself out of that fog that I realized how completely unrepresentative it was of a normal working environment. As a country, those who couldn’t see how horribly divided we’ve been and don’t remember that things were not always like this are finding themselves out of the fog and in a better place for the first time in a long time. Republicans, unless they really change, will try to divide us again. We should make sure they never get the chance.
