All the states that hate you, By Mark Morford
Of course they don't. Nor do they hate gays, or women, or immigrants, or liberals, or Muslims, or Jews, or Obama, or anyone/anything that threatens their constrictive ideology, that doesn't gibe with their tragically limited worldviews, politics, nervous sexualities and timorous understandings of God. It just seems like they do.
Perhaps all the easily panicked, right-wing citizens of these unhappy locales simply do not have the means to access a wider context, a subtler and more nuanced understanding. Perhaps they have not, as Obama and millions of others have already done, allowed their perspectives to evolve and deepen to encapsulate history and civil rights, kindness and empathy, a modicum of compassionate, open-throated love. You think?
More significantly, perhaps far too many clenched conservatives have yet to experience any sort of backsplash from their own inbred homophobia and misogyny; they have no gay relative, co-worker, or friend who's been abused and abandoned by the hateful laws the GOP enacts. They have yet to befriend a needful young female who's been denied a cancer screening or basic health care due to their state's trashing of Planned Parenthood. After all, it's always easy to drop bombs when you never have to see the charred bodies on the ground.
Shall we be thusly generous? Shall we be slightly forgiving about all the people in all the backwards states who continue, despite the sway and pulse of history, to hammer away at the basic rights of gays and women, immigrants and love, just like Jesus never even slightly in a million goddamn years intended? Know this now: It ain't easy. ...
(Full URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/05/23/notes052312.DTL&nl=fix)
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