I readily admit it: I don't know how to do it. Perhaps it's because I live four blocks from The Gayest Place on Earth; or because I went to a top 20 gay-friendly college; or because homosexuality—like everything pertaining to sex—was explained to me early on in purely biological (and rational) terms by my parents. No matter the reason, the fact of the matter is that I don't understand how to reason with people who vote against granting equal marriage rights to all citizens on moral grounds.
I can rationalize the legal reasons for why these bans may have passed. (For example: Why should government involve itself in "marriage," an institution born of religion? Marry no one in City Hall—grant only civil partnerships!) So that's no problem. My issue is I don't know how, or even whether it's possible, to argue with someone who holds such extreme moral views about homosexuality. I can say the same thing, really, for someone who believes a zygote to be a human being; or someone who literally interprets the Beatitudes.
It's one thing to dismiss extreme moral views as the result of ignorance, it's another to try to grapple with an otherwise well-informed individual who holds these sorts of views. I read, recently, a blog post by a smart, college-educated girl who went to grade school with me. A week before Election Day, in a blog post titled "What I Stand For," she wrote—
"I believe that legal marriage should only be between a man and a woman. I do not believe it discriminates against homosexual people to defend that time-honored definition. I do not dislike homosexuals; I will not stop being any of their friends. I will not call them names; I will not belittle them. But I will do all that I can to stop them and those who are for it from changing the definition of marriage that is the very basis of society and everything I believe in. A person does not have the right to marry anyone he or she wishes to. We do not have the right to choose anything or anyone. Men cannot marry men. Women cannot marry women. People cannot marry animals. A 40 year-old cannot marry a 12 year-old. A man cannot marry more than one woman, and a woman cannot marry more than one man. Marriage is a privilege, not a right. It is a word with a definition that I do not want to have changed."
The equating of consensual, mature, homosexual love to pedophilia, polygamy, and bestiality! The irrational fear that another person's marriage defines your own! I'm at a loss.
Some have asked me why I trouble with trying to decipher such views, and the reason is that I have been trying to decide whether it's of any use to even try to argue with such people, so as to try to get them to vote differently. Perhaps we ought to explain to them that a gay marriage ban is not really a ban on gay marriage, it's a rejection of marriage equality and a dismissal of human rights.
Over the past few days, I've decided that I will not try to argue with these people. Fortunately for all those who embrace rational thinking and who not only laud but actually enshrine equality, the arc of history and progress is bending in the right direction. The younger generation—my generation!—is overwhelmingly, by 2 to 1, for marriage equality. Every day, more people who grew up ignorant of or prejudiced towards homosexuality are turning around and either discarding those views, or simply acknowledging that this is a human rights issue. While this year California, Arkansas, and Florida did not move forward with the tide of progress, they will. Soon.
Top left: My Election Day voting stickers, unintentionally placed next to a photobooth reel depicting a happy time with friends, one of whom is a queer activist; Directly above: My "No" on Prop 8 vote.
-- Daniela Perdomo
The problem with a word like progress, and its derivatives, is that it's necessarily relative. While I believe in the significance of progressivism, I worry about the congratulatory, doe-eyed mood that's taken over the electorate. I worry that we'll settle and fall short of the most progressive progress possible.
The code word for progress in today's political lingua franca is, of course, change. It's been the theme of the past two years of presidential campaigning, as Barack Obama re-framed partisan politics into a choice between Washington-as-usual and Washington-as-it-could-be. After eight years of cronyism, bellicosity, and the debasement of civil liberties, Obama's resounding electoral success last week was as much a rejection of political sameness as it was a genuine confirmation of the need for change.
Yet despite messianic "Change Has Come" headlines, it is not enough to have voted in the first black president, or to be satisfied that Obama's White House will be more progressive than the one the neo-conservatives are about to vacate. (The former is, indeed, progress; the latter is simply obvious.) We can't accept the mainstream definition of progress as simply better-than-Bush. We need to demand that our elected officials seize this unique opportunity in American political discourse to progress significantly further to the left, and quit pandering to the center-right.
This is necessary because there's a stark difference between change we can believe in and change I believe will actually be enacted—
I believe in universal health care; but I believe what we'll get is an opt-in system that still panders to insurance companies' profit margins. I believe in energy independence; but I believe that we'll continue to heed inefficient, home-grown corn ethanol and so-called "clean coal" lobbies on our way there. I believe in the separation of church and state; but I believe that taxpayers' money will continue to be funneled to faith-based initiatives. The list goes on.
I harbor no illusions that all my progressive ideals will be met under an Obama presidency. He is, pundits' claims notwithstanding, decidedly not the herald of American progressivism (See: stances on death penalty, marriage equality, etc.), but he is the most liberal politician ever elected to the highest executive office. The political capital garnered by this election is an ideological mandate for progressivism that we've never had before. Gone is the need for Clintonian incrementalism—we can actually bet big.
The difference between progress I believe in and the progress I believe is most likely to actually occur under the forty-fourth presidency and one-hundred-eleventh Congress need not be so stark. More-than-better-than-Bush progress requires action: We must demand the most progress, not just enough progress.
-- Daniela Perdomo
There were two items published recently which offered different insights into how the Internet has affected our brain functions. The first was an Atlantic cover story titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" in which Nicholas Carr wrote of how avid web use has eroded his ability to read long stretches of prose where it was once easy and pleasurable. (The irony being, of course, that the essay in which he argued this point was nearly 5,000 words long.) The other was a study by UCLA memory specialist Gary Small, where he had participants read books and perform web searches while undergoing cognitive brain imaging. The result? Searching the web sped up decision-making and complex reasoning.
Carr's ruminations, however, are not mutually exclusive from the results produced in the lab at UCLA. In fact, I would argue that while I believe my expert handling of hundreds of RSS feeds every day has made me an incredibly skillful and efficient consumer and digester of information, I, like Carr, also find deep, novel-length reading harder than it once was. My pithy hypothesis, then, is that the Internet has made me both smarter and dumber. So be it. I'm not fighting it—instead I'm embracing it as the evolution of human intelligence in an increasingly technology-laden world.
All this to say that I think about the Internet and how it affects me and the world I live in on a consistent basis. I am on the computer every day, for hours on end. It's both my livelihood and a personal obsession. Even when I worked at a major national newspaper, I never read news and analysis in broadsheet form. This morning's paper is no longer just tomorrow's fish-market wrappings—it's already this morning's old news. The Internet, on the other hand, thanks to constant refreshment and the advent of 2.0, is exciting, relevant, and interactive.
And so because I think so much about how the information I garner from the Internet affects me and how I act and react in the real world, I started to think about what I thought was missing from my web life, which increasingly blurs with my real life. Here's what I discovered: I spend a lot of time reading policy and cultural analysis by the established "netroots." And then I spend a lot of time discussing it—online and in person—with other smart, engaged young people. I have had ridiculously stimulating discussions on incredibly important issues with friends on Gchat. On Gchat! From here on, one question lead to the next: Why are we letting these intellectually-charged exchanges waste down an untapped reservoir? Is it because we're in our twenties and don't fit the "netroots" model of middle-aged (possibly gay, possibly male) progressive intellectuals and therefore don't think we could attract the readership they do? How is it that a grassroots movement doesn't have young people at or near its helm?
That's when the Whyroots idea was born. I wanted a place where smart, curious writers and thinkers in my age demographic could share their voices and challenge each other to consistently think about the most important policy and cultural issues. Individually, at most, we are over-educated, plugged-in, driven twentysomethings with a lot of potential. Collectively, at the very least, we will make more of an impact than any of us could on our own. Further, writing with a team will force our ideas to develop and progress, in a way that a solo project wouldn't really allow. I know we have something to add to what's already happening in the netroots, and something new to introduce to it as well. (For more, you can read the mission statement I wrote for our project on the About page.)
What can you expect from my page on Whyroots? I like to think my interests are vast, but I know they are concentrated mostly in politics, so let's start there. I don't think the netroots does enough. "Progressive" netrooters are just as much blind cheerleaders for the Democratic Party as FOX News is for the GOP. Over the past 20 month-long presidential campaign season, I saw a lot of liberal voices forgo their core ideals in the name of political expediency. Some argue that such allowances are necessary in a binary partisan political system such as ours, where our choice is artificially narrowed to Blue or Red, and we might as well fully support the lesser of two evils one-hundred percent or else we might end up with more of the last eight years. I disagree: I think we'll only move the power-wielding center further to the enlightened left by calling them on it, even before an election is won. So you'll see that kind of writing by me here. (One issue I'll start tracking, for example, is the commitment Obama made to the SEIU and other core allies about instituting health care and environmental reform within the first 100 days of his presidency.)
I'll throw in, too, analysis and thoughts about others' writing; ideas about books and technology; and I imagine I'll busy myself with quite a bit of social commentary. And I hope to learn about myself, my thought process, and where my ideas might take me.
As I said earlier, the web has certainly changed the way my brain accepts and processes an enormous array of information on a daily, even hourly basis. With the ever-expanding breadth of information available to us it's become increasingly important to make connections between a multitude of issues, events, and analyses thereof. My hope is that while the Internet may spread us thinner in some ways, a project like Whyroots may give us the opportunity to counter-act those effects and give focus to the many soundbites and headlines that hurdle, incessantly, our way. I suppose, then, that the motivation for Whyroots is a search for both a demographic shift in the netroots and a paradigmatic one, too.
-- Daniela Perdomo
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