Reply #43: Not even slightly. I think his expedient use of religion keeps having unintended consequences.

[PurityOfEssence]

People look at the McClurkin and Warren incidents as ones of homophobia, but I look at them as yet more unintended consequences of sucking up to the danger of religion for personal gain. Obama thought and thinks that he can cleave off a huge slab of support by playing up to the religious, but he either doesn't realize or doesn't care about the dangerous bigotries within those groups.

Religion doesn't play fair. That's its point. It's better. Others are inferior. It's deeply, deeply anti-democratic and xenophobic by definition. There's window-dressing of coexistence, but the very soul of the major religions is one of insular superiority and dominance.

The darker implication of all this is that he'll jettison all sorts of people and groups in order to seek and/or maintain power. The question raised by that is this: where will the line be drawn? Who's really unscrewable in the tactical moment? The possible answers are rather depressing.

What does it matter if you gain the world but lose your soul? What does it matter if there's a "d" after your name if corporatism is to remain sacred? What does it matter that you dispel the myth that Democrats are lily-livers if you have to go into a stupid, fruitless, dangerous, expensive and addle-headed war like Afghanistan to do it?

He's charted a less rightward course than I thought, and it's good to see certain things like the labor moves, but there's plenty to be concerned (yes, grating assholes, the word was "concerned") about. All of us are expendable at some point, but it'd be nice to think we weren't all just a few twists and turns away from the chopping block.

Religion is the greatest danger, and he's blown it completely with that; we're endorsing and inviting theocracy like never before in our history. Non-heterosexuality just happens to be the current issue at odds with this true evil, and that's why he's drawing fire for it.

As far as I can tell, he may feel a bit weird about gays, but he doesn't dislike them, and had he not courted the blockheads of certainty, he'd probably be fine with the full enfranchisement that they deserve. The problem is paying the piper of the assholes of the supernatural.