Responsibility, Change, and Character

So, it's December 6th and I haven't posted in four days. The holiday preparations continue to rev into ramming speed, and I suspect posts will be fewer and farther between until after the New Year. But I wanted to touch upon a subject I've already mentioned and develop it a bit, in preparation for more concentrated treatment when life becomes a bit less harried (ha, ha).

One of Barack Obama's most attractive, to me, themes during the recent presidential campaign was the concept that the restoration of American liberties and freedoms must go hand in hand with a general re-shouldering of individual and social responsibilities. "We are the change we've been waiting for" is not a new slogan, but remains a true one. Jim Hightower's most recent monthly newsletter (Dec. 2008, Vol. 10, No. 12: if you're a political progressive and don't read the Hightower Lowdown, look into it) takes up this message:

"If last month’s sweeping vote for change is to come to fruition, We the People must be the ones who nurture it. We can’t just crank back in our La-Z-Boys and say, “We did our job – now Barack can do the heavy lifting for us.” We tried this laid-back approach after Clinton won in 1992 – with unpleasant and unprogressive results.
"If you think your job is done, look who’s waiting for Obama in Washington: a swarm of Wall Street bankers, the war machine, 13,000 corporate lobbyists, naysaying Republican Congress critters, right-wing yackety-yackers, weak-kneed Democrats, the conformist media, and other powerful forces of business-as-usual politics. These insiders intend to shape his presidency in their image.
"We have to be the counterforce, pushing insistently, vociferously, and persistently from the outside. Who’s “we”? You and me – determined citizens, working through our personal networks, public-interest organizations, progressive media, the netroots nation, unions, community groups, and other connections to grassroots activism.
"Obama was the candidate of change, but he’ll be the president of change ONLY if we buck him up and back him up. We must stand up and speak out on every move the insiders make; we must propose and push progressive ideas and ideals; and we must certainly expose and vigorously oppose any capitulations he will be pressured to make to the corporate powers.
"If his presidency is to be worthy of the enormous effort that so many put into it, worthy of the deep potential of this political moment in American history, you and I have to be on the alert and in the face of power...
"From the start, I’ve felt that the most significant thing about the Obama phenomenon was not Obama, but the phenomenon – the fact that millions of ordinary Americans (especially young people) were not merely enthusiastic but were engaged, organizing and mobilizing, taking possession of their democracy, and doing the grunt work that is the essence of self-government.
"People really do want change – not as a political buzzword, but as a fundamental matter of national direction and policy. In fact, for some time, folks have been shouting: CHANGE! Get our troops and America’s reputation out of Iraq. Provide good health care for all. Rein in greedheaded CEOs and corporate lobbyists. End “tinkle down” economics. Re-invest in America’s infrastructure. Rebuild middle-class opportunities. Deal with global climate change. End the use of torture. Get serious about green energy. Restore our stolen liberties. Stop polluters. And, generally, reinstate the Common Good as America’s governing ethic.
"As Obama himself often said on the campaign trail, he is not the change. We are. By electing him, we opened the White House door to the possibility of change. Now we must see it through."

This kind of collective effort is part of what I, personally, mean when I talk of social responsibility. Effecting political change by continuing to work, noodge, speak out, demand and protest. Individual responsibility includes doing so in an honest, researched, thought-through and consistent fashion.

Which takes me back to the issue of gay and lesbian civil rights. Like much of the rest of America, I've seen "Proposition 8: The Musical," which I think is a brilliant piece of agit-prop. If by some chance you haven't encountered this three-minute tour de force, check it out on YouTube. Touching back upon the December 2008 Hightower Lowdown, which disappointed me by not addressing the horrific anti-gay legislation that was passed in four states even as Obama was elected, it did trash James Dobson and his Focus on the Family Christian-right organization for publishing an apocalyptic anti-Obama brochure right before the election. Written from the perspective of a shell-shocked "Christian" chronicling the abominations of four years of the Obama administration in the year 2012, one of its many fear-mongering prophecies was that a liberalized Supreme Court would force schools to teach first-graders that homosexuality is good.

Well, that set me to thinking. Of course the Dobson brochure is despicable, and largely ludicrous. But somehow it made something very clear to me. I think homosexuality, in and of itself, isn't good and isn't bad. It just is. Just like heterosexuality, in and of itself, isn't good or bad, it just is. Some of us are 100% homosexual, some of us are 100% heterosexual, and some of us fall somewhere inbetween. I've come to believe that each individual's possible spectrum of sexual preferences is almost as hard-wired as hair and eye color. Which means legislating discrimination against gays and lesbians is about as sensible as legislating discrimination against blond-haired or green-eyed people. Whether someone is gay, or blond, or green-eyed does not determine whether or not that individual is a decent person.

The only factor that may affect the character of gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered people is a societal one, the still far too commonly parrotted lie that anyone who isn't easily classifiable as "straight" is somehow "less moral" than "the rest of us." If as you grow up you realize that you are homosexual, or attracted to either gender, or don't fit with the sex characteristics with which you were born, you can't escape being bombarded by the societal expectation that you will be a "lesser" or "bad" person. Since expectations do shape us up to a point, those who aren't vanilla/straight have a harder row to hoe -- they have to fight against a whole set of external and internalized expectations of failure (much like people of color or women in general) on top of all the common vicissitudes and adversities.

Nonetheless, a large part of every identifiable population -- whether it's white straight women, gays, African-Americans, or transgenders -- consists of plain old good people. People who are honest with their friends, loyal to their partners and children, responsible about their duties to themselves, their families, their community, their employers or employees. Whatever the difficulties we face, we are capable of demonstrating good character. The capacity to live as a responsible human being is not affected by our sexual preference or orientation. Unfortunately, the capacity to participate equally in the benefits offered by our society still is.