I should have known he would start. My beloved cousin Mary is married to a man who is, in many ways, really sweet. He's recovering from cancer. However, he's also a rabid die-hard conservative who would prefer that Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter be Pres. and Vice-Pres. This morning I got one of Johnny's forwards, the kind that have been forwarded to hundreds of other people. One of them was praising the virtues of McCain's wife as first lady. (If that's all McCain has going for him, then he might as well quit now.) The other was an attack on gay rights, especially gay marriage.
So what do I do? I thought about sending him a yard sign or bumper sticker that played on the McCain = McSame (as Bush) idea. Particularly good was the one that referred to pre-Bush gas prices compared to today's gas prices. However, when I went to my favorite web site for such things, I realized that there was enough offensiveness to go around to all the candidates, both past and present.
I'm not sure which ones offended me most, the neocon attacks on Barak Obama's middle name of Hussein, the play on Obama's name [the only difference between Osama and Obama is BS], the attacks on Hillary Clinton made by Obama supporters [Bros before Hos], or the simple-minded gutter-garbage [F*** Place-Candidate's-Name-Here]. I thought of killing two birds with one stone [horrible metaphor] and sending Johnny a button that says "Gays and Lesbians for Obama" but I was sure that he would solidify his belief that all liberals are at heart some kind of "deviant." He really would be amazed that honest, hard-working, intelligent, kind, generous people of all types can and do believe in gay rights, pro-choice, and ending the war in Iraq.
I honestly haven't committed in my heart to Obama, though I said when I heard him speak at the Democratic Convention that one day he would be president. I really like him, and I really like his wife. What I don't like and what I fear is his appropriation by certain kinds of people. If he were to distance himself from the Hillary-haters the way he's distanced himself from his former pastor, I'd feel more comfortable. Certainly, his choice for vice-president will reveal something. On the other hand, I don't like McCain's attitude toward war. I think he's too old to be president. And his wife gives me the creeps. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because she looks like one of the robotic mind-controlled bimbos from an old James Bond movie. (That hairstyle is scary.) I don't normally vote Republican (in fact, I've only voted Republican once and that was back in a Louisiana governor's race, when the Democratic choice was Edwin Edwards, the biggest slimeball who ever lived). The only way I'd vote Republican in this election is if the vice-presidential candidates were people I had strong reactions to. I'd have to feel super-negative toward Obama's running mate and super-positive toward McCain's, and that is not likely.
On the other spam thing that Johnny sent me, the one attacking gay and lesbian civil rights, I have to say I'm tired of that old hatemongering. There is absolutely no good reason to deprive one group of people of the civil rights that the rest of us enjoy. We just had a nasty situation in our state in which a group of high school female freshmen beat up a lesbian girl who had had the audacity to speak out for the rights she believed were being denied to gay people. That was when I learned that Michigan has no laws on the books that deal with hate crimes! The reason, supposedly, given by one of the legislators is that they didn't want to single out any one group of people and give them special rights to prosecute another group. Say what?!!! Wouldn't it be easy enough to say that if you attack (physically, verbally, however) another person because of that person's intrinsic differences from you (color, race, sexual orientation, religion, gender), that you are committing a hate crime? That way it wouldn't be black/white or gay/straight or any one group having a monopoly, unless, of course, you consider that very few gangs of gay people beat up straight people because they're straight. Come to think of it, I've never heard of any situation like that at all.
So what will I do about Johnny? The best solution is nothing at all. He wants to get a rise out of me, so if I ignore him, maybe he'll stop. Or--maybe he'll believe that he's winning me over. Geez. I've emailed Mary in the past and asked her to get him not to forward that crap to me, but I suspect he sees that merely as a challenge. Perhaps I'll wait, and if he does it again, I'll put him on a liberal think-tank list of some kind. Maybe I'll donate some money to the Obama campaign and put down Johnny's name and address as the donor. Then he'll get lots of mail and phone calls to entertain him.
Anyway, what Johnny doesn't realize is that maybe my present commitment to Obama is sort of soft, but if he keeps blasting me with his conservative garbage, my commitment to Obama and against McCain will grow strong and passionate. S.
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