This is Part 4 of an ongoing series of diary entries depicting my change of heart from anti-gay activist and paid staffer of the National Organization for Marriage, to advocate of marriage equality. Part 1 of this story can be read here.
When I started my second semester in the spring of 2006, the definition of marriage still hadn't taken center stage for me. I was focused on foreign policy and our projection of strength around the world. President Bush’s approval ratings were in the low forties – suppressed by growing discontent with the war in Iraq. His “stay the course” strategy was not being met with much enthusiasm but I was proud to stand by him even when it was not popular to do so. I still believed in the importance of the mission and that we would eventually prevail.
There was another election coming up that year – the November midterms – and I had hoped the Republicans would be able to maintain the majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate and control of the legislative agenda. History, however, would tell another story. And that story was a clear illustration of the far left takeover of the Democratic Party. It only confirmed their abandonment of moderate politics and shored up in my own mind why I now stood with the Republicans. The setting of this story was the State of Connecticut – a blue state which had sent a moderate Democrat to represent them in the Senate since 1989. Although this moderate Democrat represented one of the smallest states in the Union, he became a powerful and influential United States Senator – the likes of which would have certainly made James Madison proud. He was the chair of the Democratic Leadership Council for the better part of a decade and was the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2000. Yet by 2006, the Democratic Party had pushed Joe Lieberman aside, nominating millionaire businessman and liberal antiwar candidate Ned Lamont instead.
“The voters of Connecticut have made their decision and I think that decision should be respected,” Hillary Clinton said, affirming her intent to support Lamont over Lieberman in the general election. She went on to donate the maximum $5,000 contribution and publicly campaigned for and with him. Her husband also backed Lamont in the general election and together they were joined by other top brass of the Democratic Party. Howard Dean, then the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, wrote a stern letter supporting Ned Lamont’s candidacy. He later called on Lieberman to drop out of the race saying Lamont won “fair and square” and that Lieberman was being “disrespectful of Democrats and disrespectful of the Democratic Party” by staying in the race.
Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York released a joint statement around the same time describing Lieberman’s loss as encouraging news for the Democrats. The perception was, they claimed, that Joe Lieberman – a Jewish Democrat and supporter of Operation Iraqi Freedom, was just too close to President Bush for their party’s liking.
Meanwhile, liberal filmmaker and activist Michael Moore, who believed the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 were at best America’s fault and at worst an inside job, used Lieberman’s primary defeat as a warning to other elected Democrats. Moore’s rhetoric ought to have been enough to put him on the fringe of American politics but in fact the Democratic Party was aligned with him through MoveOn.org, a liberal political action committee. MoveOn spent twenty-seven million dollars helping the Democrats take control of Congress that year including $251,126 specifically for Ned Lamont – more than fifty times greater than their contribution to any other federal candidate for U.S. Senate that year.
“Let the resounding defeat of Senator Joe Lieberman send a cold shiver down the spine of every Democrat who supported the invasion of Iraq and who continues to support, in any way, this senseless, immoral, unwinnable war,” Moore wrote on his website, adding Joe Lieberman made a colossal mistake that he would have to pay for.
“To every Democratic Senator and Congressman who continues to back Bush's War,” his remarks continued, “allow me to inform you that your days in elective office are now numbered. Myself and tens of millions of citizens are going to work hard to actively remove you from any position of power. If you don't believe us, give Joe a call.”
While this abandonment and isolation of Joe Lieberman played out on the left, the voices of the right were expressing my exact thoughts. It’s one thing when your beliefs are betrayed by the Democrats with whom you once identified. It’s another thing when the Republicans are singing your tune, at the same time. It was like being pushed away by two negative sides of a magnet and being pulled in by a vacuum on the other side.
“When we see the Democratic Party reject one of its own, a man they selected to be their vice presidential nominee just a few short years ago,” Vice President Cheney said of the Democrats, “it would seem to say a lot about the state the party is in today.”
Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow called it a defining moment for the them, saying the leaders of the Democratic Party “have made it clear that if you disagree with the extreme left in their party they’re going to come after you.”
Lieberman was forced to run as an Independent and with the support of Independents and Republicans determined to block Ned Lamont, he won and went back to Washington for a fourth term. Even though it was without the endorsement of his party or the support of most of his longtime friends and political allies, he promised to continue caucusing with them. It helped the Democrats secure control of the Senate that year. They also took the majority in the House of Representatives and a woman was sworn in as Speaker of the House for the first time in U.S. History. It was a great milestone but unfortunate in my mind at the time that Nancy Pelosi – another California liberal – was the embodiment of that milestone. Their takeover of Congress proved, among other things, that the Republican Party’s effort to mobilize its base of social conservatives failed. The Republicans had tried in the months leading up to the election to take on a number of pet projects important to social conservatives. One of the first of such projects was a constitutional amendment banning flag desecration and it was an important issue for me.
“Our flag is a national symbol,” I wrote in a Facebook Group I created to support the amendment. “And because of its status as such, it should be protected from desecration just as our currency is. That we earn money and keep it in our wallets does not mean that we actually own those bank notes. An individual can not own the national symbol. Thus, it is not his to burn or alter. Support the constitutional amendment banning flag desecration.”
My effort on Facebook was small but it was all I could do as a nineteen-year-old college student. I wanted to do more to push back against leftist assaults on the national identity. They were after the national motto; they were targeting the pledge of allegiance; they were dubbing over ‘Merry Christmas’ and now they were burning the flag. They had no respect for this country. They were only concerned with taking affirmative action to fill college seats with a less qualified, minority students at the expense of more qualified white students; of dividing and categorizing minorities into special protected classes – ironically, in the name of equality; of ridding society of religious references, however vague, because someone might take offense; and of taking away from those who have that which all do not have.
My anger swelled. My patience lapsed. On one hand I could not tolerate what I was watching. On the other hand, there was nothing I could do except make a Facebook Group. It made me shout out – sometimes so obscenely that anyone in the vicinity must have turned their heads. Little could they know my vulgarity-ridden tirades were directed at stories I was watching on Fox News. I was alone but I’d yell out looking for someone, anyone else in the room for an explanation of the madness. The last person I knew who yelled at the television screen like that was my step-brother’s grandmother, who raised her fist and cursed at Chris Matthews on MSNBC before she passed away. I was too young then to recall now who was getting her all worked up – Chris Matthews or his guests – but it was then I came to understand why she was so upset those evenings in front of her television.
“It’s not just your flag,” I explained time and time again. There was just as many who opposed my group as supported it. The opponents couldn't resist the urge. They couldn't allow us like-minded conservatives to have a group and let us be. It must be something about liberals, I thought. They are so self-absorbed and think their opinion is of such great importance that it is difficult for them to come across a conservative group like mine and not chime in. They mistake the freedom of speech for a right to be heard and trickle into conservative groups for an audience to debate or in many cases just to instigate a quarrel. In the early days of my Facebook activism, I took the bait and engaged in lengthy debates with one liberal intruder after another to defend my cause. It was tiresome repeating the same things over and over again. Sometimes I felt they were making fools out of us – one after another asking the same questions. It must have been comical for them to occupy so much of our time. Perhaps in our naivety we thought we could actually change somebody’s mind if we could just spell out our stance logically.
“It’s the Nation’s flag. It carries with it the spirit of the American people. It represents our history; it symbolizes freedom not only here in the United States but across the globe. If you look at the people who burn our flag around the world, they are our enemies. Burning our flag is their way of attacking our country and to do so as a citizen makes you a traitor.”
With that sense of nationalism I was, in the words of my opponents, no better than Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union where burning the flag was a criminal act. Was that true? I didn't know but I came to learn that in a political debate it is just as effective to call out your opponent’s historical errors as it is to lay out your own case. If I could find an error in one of their points then I could undermine their credibility. If I undermine their credibility then you can’t trust what they say. And if you can’t trust what they say then I win the debate. So I looked it up.
Through my desire to get one up on my opponents, I learned how the red swastika flag came to be the national flag of Nazi Germany in 1935 but I had to do more than scratch the surface of Nazi flag history to find out if there was actually a law that banned burning it or if the whole thing was just something my opponents threw out to see if it stuck. Perhaps they were counting on me not looking it up and although I searched and searched the best I could ever come across was a one-line stub – too short to call an article – on Wikipedia.
“The Nazi Anti-Flag Desecration Law was a law passed under the Nazi regime, making it illegal to burn, destroy, or otherwise desecrate the flag.” It was far from enough to settle it so I pressed on with fact checking. I quickly discovered it was even more difficult to come across a clear answer about the legality of burning the Soviet flag – only that it was in fact historically burned in public protests around the world. Did that mean there were no anti-flag burning laws there?
As I saw it, I had a couple of options. One, I could concede the laws existed historically but deny their relevance to the desecration of the United States flag. I didn't have an answer for that ready but I was confident I could come up with a half-decent rationalization. Although a couple of thoughts ran through my head I had a better idea. Putting those thoughts into words would be time-consuming and the rationalization I came up with would certainly be subject to scrutiny. That kept me on defense but I could turn this around. The burden of proof should lie with them just as it lies with the prosecutor in a court of law. If they were going to claim the Republican-sponsored flag desecration amendment was comparable to anti-flag burning laws in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, then they had to back that up with credible sources. If they could not – or all they had was that short stub on Wikipedia – then by discrediting their source, I could win the debate by proxy. For if they cannot back up their claim, then you can’t trust what they say. And if you can’t trust what they say, then they must be wrong.
I said win by proxy. It was my way then of tiptoeing around the actual issue. Let me say it another way. Just as much as I came to learn how liberals couldn't resist the urge to be heard, I suspected they might be tempted into providing the proof I wasn't able to find. Imagine the inherent satisfaction in taking on a conservative’s challenge for evidence and shoving it right in his face. In that way, by shifting the burden of proof onto them, my Facebook Group became Doctor Frankenstein’s basement laboratory and a straw man of my creation was on the verge of virtual consciousness. When those… flag burners came back with the shreds of evidence I challenged them to provide, I could refute them one after another until the cows came home. I could create the impression that the Republican flag desecration amendment and the Nazi anti-flag burning law were not one and the same. Then, not only could I demonstrate that the flag burners were speaking in ridiculous hyperboles but that the constitutional amendment to protect our flag truly was an American – not Nazi – principle.
After all, the Nazis were the worst group of people to ever walk the face of the Earth. To be politically compared to them is essentially the most severe insult which must immediately be addressed for it results in death by association. If such a comparison is not met with instant disassociation by the accused and instead allowed to linger, it sticks and doesn't go away. It is a favorite leftist debate tactic used against conservatives for a quick kill.
But I had my own method of delivering a quick kill – a power I alone wielded as the owner and sole moderator of the Facebook Group. When those liberal flag burners became too much of a nuisance, either because they were instigating my members or had a point I couldn't defeat with my straw man arguments and didn't want to deal with them anymore, I blocked them and they were silenced – something I compared to Stalin sending political prisoners to Siberia. How’s that for a Soviet Union comparison? I even enjoyed visiting the list of banned members from time to time. I would move my cursor over the button next to each person’s name that would have unbanned them and set them free but rarely did so. As a result, the number of names on that list grew larger and larger and it was a source of satisfaction for me especially because they believed the first amendment guaranteed their right to free speech in my group. I took pleasure in demonstrating with an iron fist – or should I say iron click – how I was under no obligation to grant them such an audience.
Amusingly – and I do remember catching myself – this stifling of political dissent was in of itself Stalinesque. I was spending so much time arguing how the flag desecration amendment and Republicans overall weren't like the Nazis or Soviet but I was guilty of being exactly that. It wasn't important, though. It was more important to hold the line. Sure, I realized that blocking my opponents only proved their point but I preferred and it felt better to reinforce my belief than to reevaluate and reconsider. That would be an admission that I was wrong and they… those godless liberal flag burners who were attacking my country’s national identity and culture, were right. No way I was about to do that.
Thus, the original debate over an amendment to the United States Constitution prohibiting the desecration of the American flag was actually fought through proxy wars between my straw men arguments and the liberal reductio ad hitlerum fallacy. Between their trolling and my increasingly -frequent policy of “ban first, ask questions later” – and at the loss of intelligent public discourse – it left much unspoken of the merits, demerits and consequences of the amendment itself.
I suppose the Nazi comparisons were inevitable, though. There is an old internet adage from 1990 – a law even – called Godwin’s Law. It states that as a political online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. In the case of this Republican flag desecration amendment which failed to pass by one vote that summer, Godwin’s Law was proven right time and time again as more liberal flag burners poured into my group and initiated the same arguments with redundant Nazi comparisons. They would resurface in another form later that year when Fox News aired a segment which opened my eyes to the spread of gay marriage which until then had largely slipped under my radar. Yet another liberal assault on the national identity and it was moving from state to state like a contagious disease.
I vowed to raise the siege. I vowed to protect marriage.