There's a wonderful series of Flash animations called There She Is!! that some of you may have seen. It's the work of a Korean animation team called SamBakZa, and the fifth and final episode was just released a couple days ago.
I bring this up on DailyKos not only to share it for art's sake, but specifically to ask, what lessons can we learn about American politics from a series of Korean cartoons about a cat and a bunny? A lot, as it turns out.
There are minor spoilers below, so before reading on, anybody who hasn't seen the whole series should watch it. Each of the five episodes is only a few minutes long.
Now, There She Is!! is heavy on the political/social commentary, and it deals mostly with the state of Japanese/Korean social relations in those two countries. But love is a universal subject, and I couldn't help feeling some parts of the story were familiar in an American context, especially towards the end.
Legions of people loudly, sometimes violently, telling other people whom they should and should not love? Relationships forced into back alleys and secret meeting places to avoid being seen by the hostile public? Relationships broken off because of fears over physical safety?
There She Is!! can be applied just as well to the gay marriage dispute in the US as it can to Japanese/Korean relations.
Do you think anyone watching these animations could side with the anti crowd by the end? Is it possible for anyone, even the most hardened conservative, to say, "Yeah, that cartoon cat and cartoon bunny should be prevented from loving each other, it just isn't natural!" The very concept of who-loves-whom being a political issue seems--rightly--ludicrous.
So why can't we, as progressives, make the same connection when it comes to the issue of equal rights for homosexuals? Or, if it's not a matter of "can't" then why haven't we?
We need to be aggressive. We need to challenge the idea that there is anything threatening or unnatural about homosexuality in general. We need to establish an equivalence between anti-gay-rights legislation on the one hand, and ludicrous restrictions like banning inter-racial or inter-religious marriages on the other.
We need to end the "politics of love"--and by that I mean, we need to make love no longer be a political issue at all. Because love is universal, it transcends politics, culture, and ideology. I don't think that we as progressives will achieve equal rights for homosexuals until we bridge that gap, until the world at large acknowledges that politics cannot restrain love.
But we'll have to work at it, bit by bit. The world won't change while we wait, and there are no tickets to Paradise.