Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Yesterday's men.

I must admit to being rather unsure as to why the US needs a law banning flag burning, especially in a country where this act rarely takes place.

The Americans have a love of their flag that I don't think is replicated in any other country in the world.

It's a bit like a nation of animal lovers, like the UK, banning the eating of dog meat. Everyone agrees, making the need for a law superfluous.

However, this is merely part of George Bush's attempt to shore up his heamorrhaging support ahead of the November mid terms.

He has also proposed the banning of gay marriage, a proposal that has no chance of succeeding.

The highlight of the swerve to the right came yesterday, when Mr Bush met a group of conservative activists to pledge his support for their proposed constitutional amendment defining marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman. He also devoted the weekend's radio address to the nation to the issue.

"Ages of experience have taught us that the commitment of a husband and wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society," the president said. "Government, by recognising and protecting marriage, serves the interests of all.

The federal marriage protection act is intended as a response to a 2004 decision by the Massachusetts supreme court, and a similar ruling expected in Washington state, to permit same-sex weddings. But it stands no chance of winning the two-thirds vote it requires in the Senate and House of Representatives, let alone ratification by three-quarters of the states. Its proposal in the Senate and its White House backing is rather an act of political symbolism on an emotive issue.

Republicans, like the British Conservative Party, always puzzle me when it comes to such issues. They are always so hopelessly behind the times.

If one looks back at the twentieth century - from the advancement of black civil rights, women's civil rights, gay civil rights - it was undeniably a Liberal century.

The only real role for the Republican/Conservative movement has been to act as a sort of temporary brake in front of an advancement of unstoppable social, sexual and racial equality.

They seem to want to harper back to the fifties when life was no doubt simpler for people who held their kind of beliefs.

The point was hammered home to me at the funeral of Coretta Scott King. There sat Bush the elder and the younger at an event that it is unthinkable that people of their mindset would have attended fifty years ago. Indeed, it's a testament to how profoundly the left have won the argument that their attendance was required at all.

Yet, there they sat, forced to pretend that they believe in a world in which we are all equal.

And then yesterday, Bush steps up to the plate and demonstrates that, on the subject of gay marriage, he doesn't understand the argument at all. He just wishes things could be the way they always were. Life was simpler then.

America was a land of white picket fences; blacks knew their place, women cooked and cleaned, and gays were unheard of.

George and his radical Christian followers can continue to pine for another, simpler, age when they understood things. But all they are actually highlighting is their own irrelevance.

Yesterday's clarion call is destined for defeat, and even Georgie knows it. That only makes the fact that he made it all the sadder.

The world is moving unstoppably forward, whether George and his gang want it to or not.

That's what makes them yesterday's men.

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