Flashback 2012: How far back will they roll the clock?

     We progress by the inch. No, by the millimeter. No, it can't be the millimeter — that's metric, and so stinks of the European socialism that we, as Americans naturally abjure.
      Maybe that's the bright spin. Maybe we progress, not incrementally, but not at all. Sometimes I look back on an old column and almost despair. Look at this from 2012. A dozen years ago. Republicans were trying to ban gay marriage and abortion in the Constitution. They're drumming on the same fixations now, having made astounding progress compelling the keyhole peering meanness that a solid majority of American oppose. A reminder that Trump didn't lead the Republicans to their sorry state — their sorry state conjured him up, like a demon. Not a cause, but a symptom. This column even includes a cameo from Ann Coulter, who popped up this week mocking Gus Walz, a teenager with social adjustment issues. I thought she was already sunk into obscurity in 2012. Again, I was being optimistic. This shit hasn't gone away. It's never going away.

     ‘This horror, this nightmare abomination!” Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote in 1852. “Can it be in my own country!”
     She was referring to the institution of slavery. And while it might be a tad strong to equate the sense of moral revulsion that slavery evoked in enlightened persons in antebellum America to the indignation sparked by aspects of the current U.S. political climate, there are without doubt correlations.
     Today people are not enslaved because of the color of their skin; chalk one up for progress. They merely have their human rights, such as to marry and form families, denied based on sexuality (in the case of gays) or the ability to conduct their reproductive health dictated by others (in the case of women).   

Harriet Beecher Stowe (Smithsonian)

     Rightly or wrongly, Stowe’s heartfelt cry echoed in my mind spontaneously this week, a cold clanking heard when I reluctantly focused my attention on the Republican Party as it prepares to hold its quadrennial political convention in Tampa on Monday, assuming a hurricane doesn’t wipe out the city first.
     It’s hard to believe, in 2012, that Americans can not only hold such backward, morally indefensible ideas but boldly urge they be written into the Constitution, the operating code of our country. The Republican platform would amend the Constitution to ban both gay marriage and abortion. Yes, it’s only a party platform, and yes, party platforms are generally chin music designed to motivate the fringes, who live in permanent hope that the modern world will somehow yet be dragged kicking and screaming back to the homespun Eden of their imaginings — we’ll drop-kick gays back into the closet, where they belong, women will be taught to marry young or else keep their knees together and, if they don’t, go off and birth their bastards in shame. It boggles me that anyone would want that, but clearly they do, though not of course in those terms.
     They prefer to invoke God, and at least they’re being honest, because being against gays or reproductive choice are purely religious scruples. People who are not in thrall to their own faiths and unable to imagine moral frameworks other than their own do not, as a matter of practice, try to dictate women’s gynecological business. They’ve so muddied the argument with talk of babies, few realize the key point is not when, but who. Who decides? They decide. They seize the right to make this decision, based on their own religious tenets, then would deny the same privilege, by law, to everybody else.
     Slavery is illuminating here for a variety of reasons. First, it answers the question: Is the United States capable of oppressing entire classes of people, despite its Founding Fathers’ hoo-ha about liberty and freedom? Answer: You bet, for nearly 100 years, officially, and then an unofficial extra century.
     Second, it asks: Did religion aid in this atrocity? Why yes. God Almighty smiled down upon slavery, and of course — to listen to the Southerners — the slaves themselves were worthy of their fate, for a variety of gross, imaginary traits and flaws, some of which are the same sexualized slurs imputed upon gays. (Aside to black readers: Yes, I know it is possible to be both black and a homophobe. Yes, I know that some African Americans resent the suggestion that the mindless bigotry they faced is comparable to the justified contempt that gays draw upon themselves by, ah, being who they are. Different situations entirely, you say: skin versus sin. I grasp your point, and disagree completely; sexuality is no more a choice than skin color. I couldn’t decide to be gay, could you? But your objection is noted.)
     National politics is often jarring, because morality tends to be local, built on family and community. We in cities tend to be liberal, tolerant Democrats who prefer addressing actual problems to cooking up imaginary ones. In Chicago, it’s easy to forget how immigrants are hated in the Southwest, or how tightly religion clutches the throat of education in places like Texas or Mississippi.
     Not that you have to leave Illinois to find glittery-eyed fanaticism. When I was in Springfield for the state fair, and picked up the local paper, the State Journal-Register, I was genuinely shocked to find its editorial page carries the column written by far right attack beast Ann Coulter — I would have bet cash money that she existed only in an electronic netherworld of online haters, occasionally ducking behind a bush to disgorge another monstrous book of twisted thought. And here she is, defending Joe McCarthy in the biggest newspaper in Springfield.
     It might be easier were all morality decided locally. Then Texas could teach creationism and the South could secede again, unchallenged this time to ostracize gays, ban abortion and, heck, re-establish slavery while they’re rolling back the clock. It had its supporters then, it would have supporters now.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 24, 2012